‘Fake science’, manipulation, constructive journalism, and starting up in Syria
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Published in
3 min readJul 20, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
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- New international investigation tackles ‘fake science’ and its poisonous effects. Reporters from the media outlets involved in the investigation successfully published numerous non-scientific papers with the publishers whose practices they were examining and also participated in several of their conferences.
- What research says about how bad information spreads online. Much of what researchers have learned in this short time helps to answer three important questions — about how much misinformation people consume, why they believe it, and the best ways to fight it.
- The universe of people trying to deceive journalists keeps expanding, and newsrooms aren’t ready. The accelerating development of artificial intelligence–driven tools that can manipulate or manufacture from scratch convincing videos, photos, and audio files represents the demarcation of a new level of difficulty.
- Make political advertising more transparent. BuzzFeed News is now working with ProPublica to collect and analyze targeted political ads on Facebook for the midterms.
- Constructive journalism: a cure for reader disengagement? Constructive journalism is experiencing a rise in engagement from both the public and the press, driven by a need for solutions to consumer news fatigue or outright rejection.
- When a link to a news story shows the source of the story, some people end up trusting it less. Readers’ trust in news stories depends more on the source’s alignment with their political preferences than the actual content of the story.
- BuzzFeed News now has a standalone site. The investigations and reporting of BuzzFeed News — *not* BuzzFeed — are now at their own BuzzFeedNews.com.
- What journalists should know about Wikipedia — a primer. “A common question we often get is ‘Should I cite Wikipedia directly as a source?’ The answer to that is a resounding no. Wikipedia is a resource and is incredibly useful in conjunction with other resources. But like any other tertiary source, Wikipedia can introduce you to a topic.”
- Starting Up in Syria: investigative journalism in one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Syria is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. But that didn’t stop three Syrian reporters from launching Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) in 2016, the first investigative journalism organization in the country.
- Nigeria’s Abubakar Ibrahim shares lessons for humanizing conflict stories. For a Nigerian journalist and writer, journalism isn’t just about sharing facts, it’s also about inspiring change, which he finds to work best when you put a face with the numbers frequently reported in the news.
- Three reasons why journalism paywalls still don’t work. “The paywall is inherently in conflict with journalism’s primary goal: to educate and inform the public about important issues.”
