Overview: Media

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

it is more important than ever to define what “fake news” actually is, and what it is not... BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan has identified three sorts ... Huffington Post blogger ... five sorts... First Draft and ... Shorenstein Center... seven sorts... @DFRLab... fake news is “deliberately presenting false information as news.”... disinformation...…

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

In 2018, we will prioritize News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy... that people find informative... relevant to people’s local community... We surveyed ... people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources ...

Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way.... how value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones; the purpose of this article is to catalog exactly wha…

The European Commission is discussing with platforms, news media, research and civil society organisations in order to design solutions to address the spread of fake news. The aim is to define the actors' responsibilities, while respecting the freedom of expression, media pluralism, and the right of citizens to diverse and reliable information.

The answer is different from person to person, and influenced by any number of muddy variables.... real News Feed samples from, 402 people ... half [news-related posts] were shared by someone other than the original publisher... Most of the obviously partisan stuff appeared not in news posts, but in the statuses of friends and family... journalis…

a report published with the Council of Europe... offers better categorizations for the tangle of bad information ... more specific than “fake news” ... [for] The U.S. midterms ... build out a hub ... monitoring disinformation, connecting with newsrooms around the country... we can start scaling it globally in 2019... The benefit of having centrali…

an ecosystem that rewards publishers in a new kind of way... to disrupt the current financial norms of online publishing... reward users for browsing the web... make advertising less intrusive and more relevant... let readers ... ‘tip’ websites that they visit based on time spent on the site.

Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…

Could hybrid crowdfunding allow public Institutions to support citizen-driven projects without killing them in the cradle?- 2nd post in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity

new crypto-economy for fearless, independent journalism that will empower action for change... the absolute dysfunction of the global information architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — that is sowing confusion, and paralyzing us... the global media in…

to protect U.S. power ... more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.... The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis­affection”... the uncontrolled spread of information... the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational …

“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..…

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

small experiments aimed at customizing that story selection to the individual reader, based on a variety of signals... where readers are located... the last time a reader visits the site. If,... publishes a particularly enterprising story on a Monday, but a reader doesn’t visit ... after that story has left the homepage ... personalize the user’s…

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

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…

While consumers are increasingly prepared to pay for online services, news is seen as less valuable than entertainment apps like Netflix and Spotify, according to a new report... consumers may be more interested in paying for experiences that aggregate multiple news brands and perspectives than for any single brand... the widespread availability …

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...

a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work... “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false... Trump supporters and adults under 26... could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users wil…

A few people have asked me recently whether my Medium membership is worth it... We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy.