via The Verge

Unhappiness with the news media, new major study about fake news and Facebook News Feed latest changes

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

• “My life as a New York Times reporter in the shadow of the war on terror.” Former NYT reporter James Risen details how the Times regularly suppressed his stories at the request of the US Government.
  🔔 James Risen will be a #ijf18 speaker
• Global unhappiness with the news media is high. In the U.S. partisanship drives what people think about the media: supporting the party in power correlates with thinking the media does a terrible job. The opposite is true in nearly every other country surveyed.
• What that new major study about fake news means (and doesn’t mean) for fact-checkers. “Fake news has a relatively large audience, but it went deep with only a small portion of Americans. Fact-checkers also draw large audiences, but don’t seem to bring the corrections to those who most need to read them.”
• “We have the makings of a perfect storm of misinformation”: A conversation with Raju Narisetti, Wikimedia Foundation Board member.
  🔔 Raju Narisetti will be a #ijf18 speaker
• New guide helps journalists, researchers investigate misinformation, memes and trolling. The Public Data Lab, a network of researchers, journalists and organizations, released a field guide for detecting and investigating online misinformation. The free and open-access guide, aimed at helping students, journalists and educators, contains a number of “recipes” for tracing things like trolling practices, the circulation of viral memes and the financial incentives that hold it all together.
• Facebook drastically changes News Feed to make it “good for people” (and bad for most publishers). Users will be given “more opportunities to interact with the people they care about,” which necessarily means less publisher content, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a post Thursday.

• ‘Today In’ is Facebook’s latest experiment in connecting people to local news. The feature, which brings together local news, updates and events, can be found in the drop-down menu on Facebook’s mobile app in six cities: New Orleans; Little Rock, Arkansas; Billings, Montana; Peoria, Illinois; Olympia, Washington; and Binghamton, New York.
• In Argentina, fact-checkers’ latest hire is a bot. Chequeado has announced the release of Chequeabot, a tool that automatically identifies claims in the media and matches them with existing fact checks. The bot draws upon natural language processing and machine learning to help perform everyday tasks for fact-checkers — who are already using it in the newsroom.
• What it’s like to see your photo transformed into a racist online hoax. Poynter caught up with Gabriella Angotti-Jones to talk about her reaction to seeing one of her photos used for a piece of fake news, as well as how that affected the way she thinks about her work as a photojournalist.
• The Washington Post hits second year of profitability and plans expansion. The team of nearly 800 journalists will be acquiring additional space in its headquarters building in downtown Washington in 2018.