From ‘news literate’ to ‘news fluent’, the best fake news researchers, and the elimination of public editors
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Stay up to date by following our Telegram channel and join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
3 min readMay 14, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
The International Journalism Festival #ijf18 was a great success, and thanks to the festival on demand videos you can now enjoy the sessions as much as we did. Topics covered in the 2018 programme include sexual harassment, disinformation, climate change, cyber-war and propaganda, artificial intelligence, the alt-right and populism, humanitarian crises, investigative journalism, basic income, trust in the media, migration, fact-checking and debunking, confronting trauma, data journalism, engagement, news start-ups, news literacy, local journalism, diversity and inclusion, public service media, business models, freedom of expression, philanthropy in the media, and many more. Here you can find some recommendations.
- Journalists can change the way they build stories to create organic news fluency. News literacy is so last decade: journalists and audiences need to focus on news fluency now, suggests a report from the American Press Institute.
- Google’s news chief Richard Gingras: “We need to rethink journalism at every dimension.” A Q&A on the company’s new Subscribe with Google feature, the open web, data privacy, and the search giant’s role in the future of news.
- Public editors are disappearing. Do readers care? A public editor, as the name implies, is supposed to be the representative of the reader in a newsroom. At a time when trust in “the media” is a concern for every outlet, the elimination of those representatives has sparked consternation among many who are concerned about organizational transparency and accountability. At the same time, it’s fair to question how much those outside the industry actually care about having an independent voice in the halls of power when there are plenty of online critics ready and willing to vociferously challenge missteps.
- Eleven newsletters to subscribe to if you work in media. An essential list of culture, tech, and policy-driven newsletters, compiled by Columbia Journalism Review.
- These academics are on the frontlines of fake news research. This is the second article in a three-part series on the people behind the misinformation phenomenon. Part one featured students working on misinformation-related projects and part three will feature notorious fake news writers.
- Rukmini Callimachi on covering ISIS (CJR’s podcast). Callimachi speaks about the dangerous beat and how her new podcast, Caliphate, came to be. In Caliphate, Callimachi expands on her NYT reporting and dives deeper into the mind of ISIS with help from producer Andy Mills.
- Today, Explained: A look at Vox’s daily news explainer podcast. With songs, interviews, audio clips and commentary, the news organisation hopes to give people an entertaining yet informative overview of some of the most important stories of the day.
- Inside Politico’s five-person interactive news team. Politico has drawn 7 million unique visitors to more than 20 interactive graphics since forming its interactive news team a year ago.
- How The Economist’s new app tries to keep people from unsubscribing. Denise Law, who led the project in a newly created role of head of product, said the new app was developed with the awareness that readers are overwhelmed by the amount of content in it, which leads them to unsubscribe.
- Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners. The company has informed publishers using its platform to offer paid memberships that it’s ending that feature.
