Bots, Google AMP and Wikileaks
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
3 min readFeb 26, 2016
edited by Marco Nurra
- Google AMP (“Accelerated Mobile Pages”) is finally here, to improve reading the news on mobile, and better compete with Facebook Instant Articles. Google is planning to speed up mobile web. Dan Gillmor asks: Is this good? The short answer is: yes — at least for now. NiemanLab had a conversation with Google’s head of news Richard Gingras: “AMP is not just about news and not just about articles.”
- Facebook seeks a reporter to join its Facebook Stories project.
- Adblocking and the power of platforms threaten to block the pipes that lead to readers. emily bell wrote an interesting piece on this topic: “As publishers lose control, are newspaper websites a dead parrot?”
🔊 Emily Bell will be #ijf16 speaker. - Bot or not? Vice’s Motherboard published on Tuesday a “botifesto” that gives a comprehensive rundown of just how useful, harmful, and ultimately inescapable bots are to our digital lives. But, what are the journalistic implications of using them?
🔊 We’ll approach this topic at #ijf16 in two different panel discussions:
📅 “Robot: tools, conditions and challenges of automated journalism”, with Frederik Fischer and Stephan Wiechert.
📅 “Can a robot do my job?”, with Emily Bell, Meredith Broussard, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Andreas Graefe and Mark Hansen.
- From “trickbait” to “sharebait”: Poynters has classified the different types of clickbait.
- It’s just over a year since Al Jazeera reporter Peter Greste was marched out of his prison cell in Cairo, bundled on to a plane and deported from Egypt back to Australia. His living nightmare — imprisoned simply for being a journalist — had ended as abruptly as it had started. Peter told the whole story in this Amnesty International’s podcast.
🔊 Peter Greste will be #ijf16 speaker:
📅 “Media freedom and the war on terror: the amazing shrinking space”, with Peter Greste.
- Google’s Digital News Initiative brings €27m to projects in 23 countries. For a primer/reminder on how the Fund works and is governed, click here.
- Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism presented on Monday a new report about news organizations and analytics. “It’s encouraging to see journalists and newsrooms taking a greater interest in actually understanding their audience. Without good analytics, you are flying blind. That’s very dangerous in a competitive and constantly changing media environment,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of Research at the RISJ at the University of Oxford and co-author of the report.
🔊 We’ll discuss this topic at #ijf16:
📅 “The use of audience data and metrics in newsrooms”, with Federica Cherubini, Sebastian Horn, Rasmus Nielsen, Aron Pilhofer and Elinor Shields.
- The NSA spied on Berlusconi. New top secret documents published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks prove for the first time that the National Security Agency spied on the Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and his closest collaborators during some of the most difficult years of his government.
🔊 We’ll discuss this topic at #ijf16:
📅 “From WikiLeaks to Snowden: protecting high-value sources in the age of mass surveillance”, with Sarah Harrison, Stefania Maurizi, John Goetz and Davide Dormino.
International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia. Come and join us!
