Nine of the more than 30 reporters who were deliberately killed around the world in 2018. (via The Guardian)

A deadly year for journalists, the myth of filter bubbles, and Trump’s narrative on the migrant caravan

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edited by Marco Nurra

• 2018 has been a dangerous and deadly year for journalists. Conflict zones such as those in Afghanistan and Syria continue to be the deadliest places for journalists to work. But press-freedom groups warn of worsening conditions in places where a free press has been a pillar of civil society, including Mexico, parts of Europe and the United States. “This has been one of the worst years of press freedom,” said Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Over the past couple years, we’ve see a deterioration in the environment in which people work, both in terms of people in prison and journalists killed.”
• ‘Killed for speaking the truth’: tributes to nine journalists murdered in 2018. Over 30 journalists have been deliberately murdered so far this year. The Guardian pays tribute to some of them.
• Media freedom hits 10-year low: report. Freedom of expression and information has hit the lowest point in a decade worldwide, with Poland, Croatia, Romania, Russia and Hungary among the offenders, according to a report published Wednesday.
• Few people are actually trapped in filter bubbles. Why do they like to say that they are? We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight (and there’s a summary version of it on Medium here). But the “popular story of how media bubbles allegedly undermine democracy” is one that people actually seem to enjoy clinging to. “Partisans therefore tend to overestimate their use of partisan outlets, while most citizens tune out political news as best they can.”
• Misinformers are moving to smaller platforms. Around the world, misinformers are migrating to private groups, chats and fringe sites to avoid detection by journalists and tech companies. So how can fact-checkers adapt to monitor them?
• Media plays into Trump’s narrative on migrant caravan. “Just look at some of the headlines,” Daniel Alvarenga, a producer with AJ Plus says. “‘Border Clash Leaves Migrants Dejected,’ ‘Storming the Southern Border.’ These headlines set the story up as a balance of power between the people aggrieved and those doing repressing, as if one party — the US government — isn’t armed to the teeth and the other isn’t pushing strollers and carrying diapers.” The US-Mexico border has even been compared to Gaza in some reporting (Israeli daily Haaretz criticized such comparisons as “Irresistible, but Dangerous”) — showing a fundamental lack of US journalists of Central American descent. When combined with other factors — editors’ lack of familiarity with the issues, the tendency of most media to exclude Central American sources in Central American stories — it becomes a challenge for the few Central American journalists to tell these stories that are closer to their literal and metaphoric home.
• Teens support the First Amendment but largely don’t trust traditional media (do they have reason to?). Virtually half of high schoolers don’t trust traditional media, but 72 percent of students say journalism “keep[s] leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done.”
• Digital-native publishers settle in to face legacy constraints, with a side of reader revenue. “It was around this time last year that things were starting to look a little dicey for the media industry’s once breathlessly-hyped digital unicorns,” Joe Pompeo wrote for Vanity Fair this week. BuzzFeed, Vice, Mashable, and Vox, “which once heralded the dawn of a new media age — replete with massive valuations, large fund-raising hauls, and millennial sex appeal — now appeared to exhibit some traits of the brands that they once attempted to disrupt.” A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, three years in the making, echoes some of Pompeo’s take on digital natives’ upcoming “frigid winter,” this time for European publishers.
• The digital-media bubble is bursting. That’s hurting a generation of promising young journalists. “What worries me is the human cost — and the cost to tomorrow’s journalism — when this happens over and over again. With the tragic demise of local newspapers, places like Mic have become the entry point into the craft for a lot of young journalists. What’s more, their newsrooms have been admirably diverse, a diversity that their journalism has admirably reflected. As they go under, such entry points disappear. And the journalists who have been through this ugly process — sometimes more than once — burn out,” writes Margaret Sullivan.
• This journalist created a system to make sure more female experts got on air. By April, 51 percent of Outside Source’s contributors were women. In just four months, simply by keeping count and holding themselves accountable, the program reached its goal.

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