Overview: Media

An op-ed from the future... In the age of cheap and accessible virtual reality, most consumers prefer to experience their narratives rather than read them... Virtual reality has given us a post-literacy landscape more grimly banal than Bradbury could ever have imagined... Books may be dead, but the stories ... the narratives that delight and disma…

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…

Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry... We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact...to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns... Profes…

AI-powered software ... could soon be weaponized for online disinformation... Although the output can be nonsensical... has also shown moments of unnerving clarity... far better-written than right-wing text we have analyzed as scholars... reliably generate tweets on political topics favored by the disinformation group, complete with hashtags... Mu…

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

Notd brings you micro-subscriptions, where publishers and writers can offer ad-free streams of notes that are focused on one or several topics... In place of ads, we are offering micro-subscriptions to these streams, where the cost is in cents per month... the contributors get most of the revenue

Mozilla announced a new anti-tracking strategy... make it harder to track users across websites ... on by default for all users... There needs to be a profitable revenue ecosystem on the web... Our third-party cookie restrictions will allow loading of advertising ... will prevent the cookie-based tracking ... a better balance for publishers than…

Scroll gives you special ad-free versions of all your favorite news sites. From cleaner pages to handy reading tools, Scroll lets you experience great content with new focus – and pays publishers more than advertising.

news industry trade associations are corruptly cashing in their political capital ... their members are newspapers, and politicians are scared of them — in desperate acts of protectionism to attack platform companies. The result is a raft of legislation that will damage the internet and in the end hurt everyone, including journalists and especiall…

The Study doing the Saying is from the News Media Alliance, the industry trade group ... the whole megillah is based on one stray number mentioned at a lunch in 2008... $100 million. From that one number, you can “extrapolate in a straightforward way” to $4.7 billion today... my son has gained exactly 39.7 pounds from the moment of his conception …

four bad assumptions reverberated through the media industry that stifled innovation and represented a big bet on the status quo, enriching tech monopolies at the expense of publishers... here are the four fallacies that broke the news... in the market for information, the truth was the best product ... an invisible hand would nudge the truth to …

A privacy focused extension to annotate, search and organize what you've seen online.

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…

Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts... accounts run by ... Internet Research Agency, or IRA... shared [news from] some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world... rhythmic, regular sharing o…

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

the Commission had joined forces with one of Europe’s most powerful foundations to keep the European debate on track "... developing new ways and instruments to reach and engage the public”... the Bertelsmann empire is stepping into the breach. With its staunchly pro-European ideals, deep pockets and broad reach ... could end up giving Europe’s a…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…

report reviews and summarises the recent available literature connecting polarisation and the news media...key findings...: little evidence that increased exposure to news featuring like-minded or opposing views leads to the widespread polarisation of attitudes... some studies found both can strengthen attitudes of minority who already hold stron…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.

open-sourcing the tools we created to do Documenting Hate... writing a guide that will let any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations... Documenting Hate came shortly after Election Day 2016, in response to a widely reported uptick in hate incidents... we decided to ask people across the country to tell us their stories ... organized a col…

many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

three documents from Europe about regulating the net:.... I see danger for the net and its freedoms posed by corporate protectionism and a rising moral panic about technology... Articles 11 & 13: Protectionism gone mad... Article 11 link tax... likely cover many of the snippets shown ... to give you an idea of what they lead to….No exceptions are …

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization... With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site.…

In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill ... Data voids may be relatively easy to diagnose, but they are very difficult to fix... cannot be achieved by removing problematic content... W…

every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld... the next great digital platform...We will interact with it, manipulate it, and experience it like we do the real world... Eventually we’ll be able to search physical space as we might search a text... hyperl…

we need to lock on our analytics to the people who willfully return to our work... There’s no one single metric that tells you how loyal... your audience is.... The Center for Cooperative Media ... audience explorer dashboard... plugs into Google Analytics... splits audiences into “Brand Lovers,” “Prospective Loyalists” and “Casual,”... free and e…

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee... final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.... in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions.

many of the initial conclusions ...about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans …