Newspaper newsrooms lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017... growing number of “news deserts”: communities where there are no longer media outlets sending reporters to city-council meetings... Can a healthier news ecosystem be built? ... a role for government in ensuring citizen access to reliable information... “There was alw…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, media coverage differed on what aspect of the event to cover... we looked at what partisan Twitter users shared ... found a clear split ... Despite the split narratives ... the voting base has been less conflicted.

On fully eight of the nine measures, “polarization increases more for the old than the young.” If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook? ... polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least... social media is important. It’s just not the whole picture... two mai…

If you’re shocked, as I am, by the Presidential election result, you live in a bubble...Your job now is to step outside of whatever bubble you live in and educate yourself... Paying for news — investing in quality journalism and a free and open press — is what allows us to maintain our democracy. It’s not a coincidence that despots like censorship…

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

it’s too soon to declare that we have entered a “post-fact” apocalypse... great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels... a sizable fraction of total political news consumption by Republicans was devoted to heavily conservative-aligned outlets lik…

In this world of hundreds of channels and uncounted websites, of exquisitely targeted advertising and unbridled social media, it is easy to construct your own intellectual ghetto, however damaging that might be to the ideal of the free exchange of ideas. "Right now the left plays to the left and the right plays to the right... That's why we kee…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

No longer will I read or give attention to hyper partisan news entities or the conservative echo chamber... I remember not long ago when tragic events used to bring us together as a nation. Now because of increasingly powerful and extreme echo chambers on the right and left these events tear us apart...In the clickbait era, media entities, aggrega…

“I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,” ... to no avail. He called on his friends in the technology industry to act on this ‘echo-chamber problem’.... Why are they making the demand of social media companies — and not news organisations?...how we see technology now: both as something separate fro…

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

we provide an overview of concerns that have dominated the public information policy discourse, and review the main insights from empirical research We conclude ... there is no empirical evidence that warrants any strong worries about filter bubbles. Nevertheless, the debate about filter bubbles is important. Personalisation on news sites is stil…

We first noticed how Trump stories drove traffic—and thus revenue—at TheStreet.com last summer... if a website earns $20 for every thousand page views, it can make, say, $20,000 on a Trump story, but only $2,000 on an article about Cruz, Clinton, Sanders or Rubio... giving him even greater leverage over the media... even the smallest items of Tru…

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."

"The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook." - Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… — Medium