Overview: Science&Technology

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

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’ve spent 18 months training an AI editor... shadow the curation performed by professional journalists on a gigantic range of topics... it now works independently.... your own personal journalist on hand at all times, ready to explain what’s going on in the world... real-time updates on important headlines, explained in the most succinct way po…

Everipedia ... seeks to become a better version of [wikipedia] ... moving to a blockchain.... a points system where creating articles and approved edits amasses “IQ.” ... a token-based currency, giving all existing editors ... a real, financial stake in Everipedia... turns Everipedia into a peer-to-peer resource... effectively uncensorable.

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

Blockchain ... creating alternatives to the current corporation owned second layer of the internet... to make quality content truly democratic... Medium ... made itself decentralized... a blockchain with a dedicated token underlying all of the content ... reward content creators... governed only by the rules... But this token would also create an…

We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy (on a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower... we decided to just try and scrape domains that were known fake, real, satire, etc. and see if we could build a data set quickly... Th…

The News Quality Scoring (NQS) will combine quality journalism content with new machine learning algorithms... as batch of stories enter the platform, they are scored on a 1-5 scale ... quality ... automatically and in real time.... Quantifiable Signals ... look at structure and patterns of the HTML page, advertising density, use of visual eleme…

a new pathway that can lead away from the abstract depiction of objects and toward a more visceral sense of real-life scale and physicality

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.

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…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger... your experiences are being powered by AI... Eventually, this “classifying” step—known as supervised learning—may become automated, as the company pursues an ML holy grail known as “unsupervised learning,” ... Facebook sees the visual cortex merging wit…

vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news ... Natural News ... are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”.. people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultu…

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

still ... publishing "dutiful, incremental pieces," ... designed to fill a daily print edition... dominated by long strings of text... a series of goals for areas including visual journalism, reader engagement, newsroom training and diversity... new content management system... build stories with visual elements and examine what the final produ…

we lost what was Good about the early web, and ceded it all to the platforms.

Freedom of speech, and of the press... also brings responsibility. The Editors’ Code of Practice... requires the “highest professional standards”... IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding ... Why support any research if 250 peer-reviewed papers ... can all be summaril…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of journalists experimenting with immersive storytelling to tell important stories in new ways... Journalism 360, an initiative to build a network of journalists willing to tackle those challenges and share what they’re learning. With this effort, we’re looking to support experiments, provide training wor…

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

For the purpose of media pluralism, an emerging concern is how to ensure that the activities of these powerful platforms do not lead to a reduction in the quantity and quality of content actually available to consumers, and/or do not undermine democratic communication (e.g. through the suppression or arbitrary selection of information). Their …

the concerns and questions new information intermediaries bring to the table are explored, particularly in regards to the effect they have on media diversity. Additionally, Helberger looks into the regulatory options for safeguarding media pluralism and regulating these new gatekeepers, who are increasingly in control of consumer data. This art…

Editor is an experimental text editing interface that explores how collaboration between machine learning systems and journalists could afford fine-grained annotation and tagging of news articles. Our approach applies machine learning techniques interactively, as part of the writing process, rather than retroactively.