Facebook wants to stop clickbait. First you’ll be shocked, then you’ll be inspired
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
3 min readAug 5, 2016
edited by Marco Nurra
- Facebook’s latest News Feed tweak smothers clickbait. “But the fact is that this is the fourth or fifth algorithm tweak in the past two years that was aimed at reducing clickbait, which makes it obvious just how difficult it is to stamp out misleading posts, while still keeping readers interested,” wrote Mathew Ingram.
- The Atlantic tried to imagine some famous headlines, rewritten for Facebook’s new clickbait policy: “What happened was we wrote a bunch of terrible headlines.”
- The future of distributed news: AJ+ producers are looking at how they can do things differently now that a lot of people are doing things like them.
- Google is working on an update to its fast mobile pages initiative, known as AMP or Google’s Instant Articles, that will feature breaking news and real-time alerts at the top of mobile search results.
- Why Facebook is so desperate to buy, copy or kill Snapchat. The power of Snapchat rests on two of its core features — it is private, and its messages are ephemeral — which Facebook keeps trying to duplicate.
- More than a third of UK internet users have tried digital detox. Study shows scale of obsession with the web, including many people feeling unable to switch off or feeling lost when they do.
- Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times is arguably the best reporter on the world’s most important beat: terrorism and jihadists. She uses social media to get inside the minds of ISIS. Here’s how she does it.
- Journalism’s lack of diversity threatens its long-term future. As the barriers faced by those from poorer backgrounds or minorities are getting higher, how can newspapers expect to stay relevant?
- Aron Pilhofer on the digital landscape, buyouts at The Guardian. “It was a hard thing to do, but when you looked at the finances, we just absolutely have no choice. We just had to do it. We had to reduce costs.”
- How an AP reporter took down flossing. When an orthodontist asked the reporter if he wanted a good story idea, the reporter, of course, said “yes.” After lots of research and a FOIA request, his inquiries caused a change in government guidelines recommending flossing.
- Poynter‘s guidelines to avoid plagiarizing. First of all: give credit to the source, preferably with a link to the original material.
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