Digital Jouralism

Great article on digital journalism: Storybench About Tutorials Articles Reinventing TV For Educators Newsletter Search for: What we learned from three years of interviews with data journalists, web developers and interactive editors at leading digital newsrooms May 26, 2017 Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey Northeastern Share on FacebookShare on Google+Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInEmail this to someone Newsrooms don’t follow a standard playbook. They scramble, they adapt, they make mistakes. But are there some go-to tools and best practices worth adopting, whether you’re a data reporter, newsroom manager, or journalism educator? Over the last three years, Storybench, a website from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism’s Media Innovation graduate program, has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects. There are a bunch of lessons we’ve learned through our interviews – published today in this working paper – that might help chart the way forward, especially for journalism schools. They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. As professors at Northeastern, we think it’s worth matching up newsroom needs and emerging practices with educational goals. Certainly, creating modular recipes for the journalism classroom has helped us immensely and we continue to use them in our courses. We hope you will, too. To borrow some terminology from the software movement, it may be worth downloading industry best practices and parsing top digital journalism case studies in the classroom. Download [72.20 KB] The full spreadsheet of interviews can be viewed here. Below, a condensed version of our working paper: Collaborative, Open, Mobile: A Thematic Exploration of Best Practices at the Forefront of Digital Journalism Beset by secular market pressures and presented with a dizzying array of new technologies for news-gathering, publishing and distribution, news media outlets have undergone a sustained period of upheaval. The tools, techniques and approaches involved in data journalism and digital storytelling remain diverse and continue to evolve, and they are often highly specific to the particular journalistic outlet, story or task involved. One of the substantial challenges, and indeed barriers to entry, for professionals, teachers, and students is trying to understand what is important to know in order to advance their skills in a targeted way. Simply put, the field can seem overwhelming in the multiplicity of options, running from different workflow processes to programming languages and applications. There remains a need, therefore, to update and consolidate knowledge of industry patterns as the field evolves and a rough consensus forms around certain procedures and takes hold across a range of newsrooms and affiliated media institutions. As Katherine Fink and CW Anderson noted in their 2014 report “Data Journalism in the United States: Beyond the Usual Suspects,” certain “enabling factors” – the size and resources of news organizations, for example, as well as constraints such as the lack of time, funding, and tools – can influence and shape the practices and operating principles of, for example, data journalists. The process of gathering meaningful data, analyzing it, then developing this output into a compelling editorial product requires extensive labor resources and specialized, often scarce, intellectual capital. Such resource demands and constraints are indeed factors across all areas of digital journalism practice. All this presents a challenge to anyone attempting to generalize a set of emergent “best practices.” However, our survey of current news practices revealed several developments that are lowering the barrier to entry faced by smaller outlets. First, important conferences such as those run by Investigative Reporters & Editors, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and SRCCON continue to make it easier for journalists to map out and learn certain fundamental skills. The propagation of this knowledge is creating a positive feedback loop that further accelerates the dissemination of specialized skills and knowledge. Second, an increased adherence to “open source” norms and practices means that both the tools and the knowledge required to produce high-quality digital journalism are freely available. Finally, even the commercial software and hardware required have seen dramatic declines in price. A review of the relevant literature reveals a range of valuable efforts to identify and categorize the tools, platforms and practices that will persist after the digital dust settles. However, current newsroom routines and workflows at the intersection of data-oriented reporting and design/visualization – how stories are “built,” so to speak, from beginning to end – merit more empirical study. Methods Conducted from 2014 to 2017, the interviews corresponded with the release of new journalism projects, graphics, stories, news apps or other media products that came to the attention of the Storybench editors as particularly intriguing or impressive efforts to advance digital and data-driven storytelling. The aim was to unpack the techniques, thinking and applications behind the news products in question. The interviews were intended both as “how-tos” and as case studies in the practice of contemporary digital journalism, graphics and interactives; they sought to reveal the technical dimensions of the projects in question while also probing at the makers’ philosophies behind the production. The newsrooms surveyed included: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Bloomberg News, The Boston Globe, PBS NewsHour, Quartz, Berliner Morgenpost, Seattle Times, Al Jazeera, Center for Public Integrity, Mother Jones, The Texas Tribune, the Associated Press, WBEZ, WNYC, WBUR, Monomagazine, Localore, Pictoline, Dadaviz, Corriere della Serra, Portland Press Heraldand The Guardian. Reviewing these interviews in aggregate, we coded recurring areas of emphasis as they related to best practices in digital publishing, such as: Common obstacles overcome (e.g., how to make responsive charts in JavaScript). Techniques learned, adopted and disseminated to others passed on (e.g., Juicer for pulling in social media feeds). Digital tools and frameworks that are being adopted (e.g., the stylesheet language SASS). Makeup of successful interdepartmental collaborations (e.g., a veteran editor working with a digital graphic designer). We then clustered these recurring themes into some broad categories with the idea of providing a general guide to what is actually going on in newsrooms at the present moment. Of course, the results are derived from a non-probability sample of industry practice. But by studying the practices and philosophies of some leading practitioners, we can begin to arrive at some loosely defined, but nevertheless discernible categories of routines and procedures that suggest important shifts in professional norms. Results Based on the interviews analyzed, three recurring themes emerged: Collaborative, open and mobile. Of course, not all of the issues and areas of concern surfaced in any given interview, but the sample was large enough to identify common patterns, which are explicated in the following sections. Collaborative, team-based story-building There is a legend in journalism that the key to digital success is hiring a newsroom unicorn: an individual with a multifaceted skillset who is equally exceptional at reporting, programming, shooting video and designing graphics. In practice, this model is seldom a reality; a far more collaborative and distributed workflow characterized the digital projects featured in the 72 Storybench interviews studied for this paper. There is a legend in journalism that the key to digital success is hiring a newsroom unicorn. In practice, this model is seldom a reality. Successful digital newsrooms employ talented people with diverse skillsets and, perhaps more importantly, construct collaborative environments in which these players can work together as a team. The traditional newsroom Balkanized production into departments – design, photo, research, city, sports, classes – and organized the prevailing workflow according to Taylorist principles in which ideas and always moved in one direction on a kind of information assembly line. By contrast, the successful digital newsrooms revealed in our Storybench survey allow nimble, multifaceted teams to self-organize, coming together organically to produce an editorial product, then gathering up into new configurations according to the dynamic needs presented by both world events and editorial discretion. There is generally an identified “project lead” to coordinate the process, but the creative drive relies on practices borrowed from disciplines like design: brainstorming, human-centered design, iteration, collaboration, rapid prototyping, user testing and an open process that doesn’t shut out ideas or personnel. One example is The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize finalist “Chasing Bayla,” which had a team comprising a reporter, an editor, a photo editor, a video editor and a developer in addition to a project manager with enough fluency to communicate effectively with all teammates to leverage the best each medium had to contribute. Laura Amico, Chasing Bayla’s project lead, is fond of using a mission statement to organize her team: “That way the reporter and the developer can trust one another because they have the same mission even though they ‘speak’ different languages.” The Wall Street Journal’s “How Trump Happened,” which visualized large amounts of polling data and involved a politics editor, graphics editor and a news app developer, and The Center for Public Integrity’s “Unequal Risk,” where editors, reporters and coders worked together to visualize government data and in-depth interviews on workplace chemicals and cancer risk, demonstrate these project management practices and are examples of multidisciplinary teams at work. These patterns suggest that educators, students and professionals looking to gain skills and experience in data, design, visualization and interactive journalism production would be well served to consider the inextricably social nature of the workflow. They might strongly identify positions in the chain of what might be called “networked story-building” where they want to contribute. The new open-source ethos Successful digital newsrooms allow nimble, multifaceted teams to self-organize, coming together organically to produce an editorial product. The data journalists, web developers and interactive graphics editors currently employed in the world’s leading digital newsrooms tend to subscribe to an altruistic ethos not unlike the one shared by the open-source software movement. Although many times these journalistic outlets find themselves competing for the same story, the tools and knowledge required for reporting infrastructure, web development and newsroom workflow tend to be shared across organizations. The wheel does not have to reinvented every time. One open-sourced census map, for example, can help the next newsroom build a better one. As Peter Aldhous, a data journalist at BuzzFeed News told Storybench: “We can stand on the shoulders of great developers and programmers. That’s a really nice thing about opensource tools.” As much as this spirit enables information sharing between newsrooms, it also allows individual journalists like Aldhous to set up a code base where upon they can layer new modifications to produce multiple stories and iterations without starting from scratch. At conferences such as those held by NICAR and SRCCON, specialized workshops held around the world, and websites such as Source, from the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Nieman Journalism Lab and Storybench, leading digital journalists come together and openly share best practices, step-by-step instructions for building news projects and freely available repositories of the latest tools used to build digital storytelling projects, news apps and newsroom tools. Github, an online repository system for software and web code, has revolutionized the way these people share knowledge and collaborate, in spite of the rivalries their newsrooms may have had. The altruistic and collaborative spirit inherent in this open-source digital journalism community is exemplified in some ways by the very willingness of interviewees to share code and tools with Storybench, which serves as a conduit and forum for connecting with the wider community. Seattle Times’ Oso landslide interactive Examples include the sharing of code from The Guardian’s real-time interactive on primary election results, the Wall Street Journal’s “The Unraveling of Tom Hayes,” and the Seattle Times’ Oso landslide interactive. Among the most revealing and characteristic examples of newsroom generosity on Storybench have been the tutorials voluntarily written by the Wall Street Journal’s Roger Kenny on three-dimensional data visualization and by George LeVines on branding and installing Chartbuilder, an open-source graphing tool itself. One shining example of open-sourced code libraries and collaboration between newsrooms is the sharing and iterations of data-driven documents, or D3, which not only visualize data, but can also analyze and manipulate it. D3 is one of the most versatile script libraries employed by newsrooms. Unlike visualization software like Tableau, D3 is transparent and accessible through a web browser’s document object model (DOM), allowing for simple manipulation, modification and debugging. Newsroom designers and developers are sharing D3 code and best practices. “A little D3 goes a long way,” Jeremy Scott Diamond, a developer with Bloomberg News, told Storybench editors, extolling the versatility of the JavaScript library. Coupled with scalable vector graphics, or SVG, digital newsrooms have made D3 the gold standard for visualizing linear, non-linear and multi-dimensional data using hundreds of D3 visualization packages. D3’s open-source nature has allowed journalists, developers, designers and researchers to contribute code and expand the number of packages available. (See D3js.org for examples.) Other JavaScript visualization libraries used in newsrooms include Highcharts, Leaflet, Sigma, NVD3 and Gephi. “We can stand on the shoulders of great developers and programmers. That’s a really nice thing about opensource tools.” – Buzzfeed News’s Peter Aldhous While many programming languages tend to become obsolete in the space of a few years, for students and journalists wanting to become adept at custom data visualization in the digital newsroom, D3 has evolved into a kind of gold standard. There are of course running discussions about whether or not all journalists should learn to code. Setting aside the desirability or need for uniform training, it is certainly useful to know that training in JavaScript libraries, specifically D3, will serve journalists who want to visualize data for their stories well into the future. Mobile-focused ideation A final recurring theme, and one that likely portends the future in this space, is the impact of mobile devices at a level more fundamental than just customization and re-purposing of news content. Design-centered thinking is inherent in mobile-centered design. As news audiences are shifting to mobile devices, so too are design standards. In fact, the Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2016” report surveyed 40 digital-native news sites and found that for 38 of them, more visitors came from mobile devices than from desktops. With more readers accessing news sites from tablets and cellphones, mobile-focused and responsive design have become a priority in the digital newsroom. Likewise, collaboration between newsroom developers and the editorial department, where mobile design is considered in tandem with coverage, is beginning to flourish. Storybench interviews have revealed several instances where mobile design frames the journalistic process itself. “Mobile was the driving idea behind [the story],” said New York Times designer Matt Ruby, who helped plan – and shared editorial control over – reporter Emily Reub’s mobile-first, flipbook-style article on New York City’s tapwater. Many other media producers have also described how the philosophy of “mobile-first” is redefining the production of journalism, and reshaping the way news producers think about stories. This represents a new and important phase in the industry’s development and one that scholars have yet to analyze fully. For example, Oscar Westlund’s “Model of Journalism” in a mobile context puts forward a multidimensional schema, running from repurposing to customization and humans to technology. To this we might add the dimension of ideation, a further iteration of mobile news practice whereby stories are conceived of and executed as what might be called “mobile native.” There has been a fair amount of attention to what has been called “mojo,” or mobile journalism, news practices, but this new conceptual turn in newsrooms demands more research, particularly relating to how new functionality and affordances are driving the editorial process in a more fundamental way. The philosophy of “mobile-first” is redefining the production of journalism, and reshaping the way news producers think about stories. It is worth noting here that, despite worries that mobile will diminish the range of stories, design constraints may actually represent strengths for journalism, whereby screen size, touch and swipe functions, faster load times and improved browser technology can be leveraged to frame digital storytelling in refreshing new ways. Newsrooms are employing nimble web design frameworks, lightweight “minified” code libraries, and versatile design markup languages like CSS and SASS to more effectively display stories on mobile. Conclusions Journalism in the digital age has always presented a conundrum: The industry has struggled to adapt to secular trends that are eroding its most fundamental business model; and yet the same technological innovations that engendered catastrophic revenue declines have led to startling advances in the actual day-to-day practice of journalism. Unfortunately, our focus on the former has often eclipsed our understanding of the latter. This effect was greatly compounded by the sheer plurality of new platforms, programming languages, tools and approaches that have characterized the last ten years. This effect was greatly compounded by the sheer plurality of new platforms, programming languages, tools, and approaches that have characterized the last ten years. What our source material—the Storybench interviews—reveals is that all the tumult produced by both economic disruption and rapid technological change is now crystallizing into a new set of “standard operating procedures,” three of which we detail in the paper above. Some of these—the rise of an open source ethos, for instance—are more philosophical and cultural in nature. Others, like the adaptation of editorial products for mobile consumption, are more pragmatic and technological in nature. Either way the bottom line is good news for those who work in journalism, as well as those who would study it – the inchoate has given rise to discernible form. The three categories, or areas of emphasis, mapped out here – team-based collaboration; open-source mentality and operations;; and mobile-driven ideation – are intended as a practical guide for understanding an evolving field and where it may be heading. The synthesis presented here is intended, to some extent, to demystify and clarify. Of course, the categories do not encompass all dimensions of computational/data journalism or related visualization/interactive development as practiced in professional newsrooms. But seeing these areas of emphasis more clearly and distinctly is important, as certain routines and workflows in this field differ substantially from those embedded in traditional reporting and editing practice. Further research might look more systematically at the data cleaning and statistical analysis-related aspects of contemporary journalism, where tools such as the programming languages R and Python, Excel, and OpenRefine might feature more prominently. Doig and others have articulated the new possibilities for doing “social science on deadline”[23]; the ways in which this is being attempted analytically in practice, from the perspective of routines and workflows, would be useful. Another promising research opportunity might examine how various institutions of journalism education have adapted to the same emerging practices we identify above. This is of special interest to us, as Storybench itself is an editorial outlet created by the faculty and students within the Media Innovation program of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. One goal of the Media Innovation program was to transform traditional journalistic pedagogy to the rapid changes occurring in the professional sphere; another was to create venues, like Storybench, through which those changes might be studied. While much work remains, we are encouraged by early steps. What becomes clear in speaking with news producers across the current landscape is that this emerging group within the journalism community frequently builds on the work of others, from the sharing of code and the complex workflow of multi-person news teams to the collective improvement of design elements and tools. For journalism professionals trying to manage and innovate at the intersection of design and data, as well for teachers and students engaged in preparing for professional success, it is vital to acknowledge and grasp the networked nature of work done in this space – and the core patterns that may increasingly characterize such journalistic work in the future. For generations, journalists working in newsrooms, particularly at print outlets, have often operated in relative isolation, mostly reporting alone and submitting copy to perhaps one editor. Broadcast outlets have, by contrast, often required extensive teams of reporters, editors, producers, and technicians to build a story. In creating online news products through teamwork, the digital newsroom of today may in some respects look increasingly like the broadcast model. However, what may ultimately distinguish this new paradigm is the degree to which open-source code and cross-institutional sharing and learning permeate the storytelling process. Funding This research was based on a project funded by the Knight Foundation. Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey teach journalism in the Media Innovation graduate program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Tagged collaborative newsrooms data journalism best practices digital newsroom best practices digital newsrooms northeastern journalism storybench working paper Post navigation How to use ProPublica’s Congress API to see where senators stand on issues How one Nascar writer found success through crowdfunding Leave a Reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Subscribe to our newsletter Storybench on Twitter What is Storybench? Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data viz and investigative journalism to VR and digital humanities. In addition to in-depth interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the classroom or newsroom. Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern's School of Journalism, is looking hard at the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here. Tags audience engagement boston globe comics journalism D3 data data driven journalism data journalism data visualization dataviz david skok digital humanities digital journalism documentary Donald Trump election facebook live future of journalism hackathon Innovation interactive interactive documentary interactive journalism journalism media innovation news New York Times northeastern northeastern journalism nuvis ochre photojournalism propublica r for journalism R tutorial science illustration Social Media society for news design storytelling SXSW Texas Tribune upworthy Video virtual reality visualization VR Categories Behind the scenes How to Insights Interviews Longform Northeastern Reinventing Local TV News Roundups Tools

Have Journalists Forgotten to Think Like Readers?

 HAVE JOURNALISTS FORGOTTEN TO THINK LIKE READERS? A MODEST PROPOSAL TO SAVE THE MEDIA: TELL IT TO ME LIKE A SIX-YEAR-OLD July 6, 2017  By Caren Lissner   Last week, I was at my desk in a newspaper office in one of the busiest corners of New Jersey, editing a crime story by a young reporter. Her article repeatedly referred to a 36-year-old man who’d just been arrested in Hoboken for “possession of CDS.” When I asked her why she hadn’t used the term drugs even once in her story, or at least spelled out “Controlled Dangerous Substance,” she thought about it and replied, “I guess I just got used to seeing it that way in the police reports.” It was, on a broader level, the same kind of question I’ve had to ask veteran reporters lately, and a question I’ve had the urge to ask when reading stories in even the most established daily media outlets, because I’ve noticed a disturbing journalistic trend—reporters and editors who’ve forgotten how to think like readers. Despite the increasingly complex and crucial stories dotting the national landscape—health insurance policy, North Korea, immigration, Syria—many daily newspapers and wire services are failing to include even a sentence of background early in their stories to give readers the tools to slide further into a complicated issue. It used to be traditional to include at least a “nut graph” soon after a lead in order to orient a reader, but these clarifications and history have been absent from the cover stories I’ve read in major daily papers. I’m not talking about “dumbing down” the news as much as making it more user-friendly, and journalists who fail to do the latter are squandering their brief but real chances to invest new readers. By frontloading stories with complex details and insider jargon, they may only drive consumers back to the memes, soundbites, and fake news that became the shorthand of the last election. To cite a recent ramification of the trend: Just a few months ago, the New York Times reported on a Morning Consult poll that said more than a third (35 percent) of Americans weren’t sure “Obamacare” was the same policy as the Affordable Care Act. The survey was conducted at a time when Republicans were finalizing their “repeal and replace” proposals and the issue was hotly debated in newspapers and on TV. The most puzzled survey respondents were also the ones most likely to be affected by the potential change, including people ages 18 to 29 (many of whom aren’t old enough to remember how insurance worked before the law). As I combed through the last four months of coverage, I found scores of stories in daily papers and other media that failed to ever include a brief phrase such as “sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘Obamacare,’” or include an explanatory sentence somewhere in the story: “The ACA is sometimes informally referred to as ‘Obamacare.’” A mere six to nine words would arm readers with the context for the increasingly complex parts of the story, but I know from my own editing experience that reporters grow weary of repeating the same history in each piece they write, and start assuming everyone approaches the news having read their other articles. This is a crass and cocky assumption, but not one made in bad faith. Journalists who spend ten hours a day researching a subject develop a skewed understanding of what others know. (This is not exactly the same as having a skewed opinion of the public’s political leanings, as happened last year, but it’s a similar issue). While several news sources (particularly those on-line) did publish explanatory stories meant to break down the complexities of the ACA, there’s no telling that a reader got to those first. It wouldn’t hurt for each story to include a sentence or two of context or background near the beginning so a reader stays invested in the debate. The Syrian crisis, for example, reveals an interesting and related media phenomenon: the conflict has been raging since 2011, with more than 400,000 lives lost and more than a third of the population displaced, but Americans’ outrage flares up on social media approximately every six months, then fades again. The periodic pleas for help occur not after a brave foreign journalist files a provocative story, but because of a viral visual. In September of 2015, the media published a photo of three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach after his family tried to flee, his socks and sneakers still intact from when—we’d presume—his parents had painstakingly dressed him that morning. The photo captured the hearts and minds of many until they settled back into complacency for several more months. “In the end,” the boy’s father told the British press a year later, in September of 2016, “the photo did not change much.” Around the time of that quote, in August 2016, an image went viral of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh of Aleppo, his face bloody and caked with dirt, sitting expressionlessly in a chair as he awaited medical attention. The social media outcry lasted another day or two. Four months later, in December 2016, visuals were published of seven-year-old Bana al-Abed, who Tweeted from Aleppo as her city was besieged by bombs and gunfire (her family ultimately escaped to Turkey). Her cries for help were retweeted with desperate pleas from Americans to save the children—and then, five months of relative quiet followed. That was, until the most horrifying videos emerged in early April: footage of kids being gassed to death in the Idlib Province. But rescue workers had been saying for years that Syria was using chemical weapons. It wasn’t that Americans didn’t care, but with their own jobs to do and mouths to feed, they grasped the impact much more quickly from a photo rather than the proverbial 1,000 words. Reporters and editors could do a better job of keeping the public invested in future stories by making the first 100 of those 1,000 words count, so they stay engaged and understand the scope of the ongoing situation. Then perhaps consumers would have a stronger opinion when, ultimately, our country responds with an unprecedented airstrike (which they did two days later)—or whatever is to come in the future. Yet what kind of reporting was going on regarding Syria just a few weeks before the April 4 gas attack? This was the Associated Press update on the Syria situation on March 5, in a general-interest story that ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, PBS.com, NBC, ABC, and other popular outlets: “Five months of multi-sided clashes in Syria’s crowded northern battlefield have displaced some 66,000 people, a U.N. humanitarian agency said Sunday, a day after the U.S. bolstered Kurdish-led forces with a deployment of armored vehicles amid preparations for a push toward the Islamic State group’s de facto capital.” The subsequent paragraphs lacked even a few words of history and context to tell readers that nearly half a million people had died in a six-year war. When newspapers use wire services, they’re using stories often written for an international audience that understands the backgrounds and can picture the geography around foreign conflicts—so individual editors should make the effort to clarify the issue for their readers. The lead paragraph of the Syria story, a whopping 48-word first sentence, at least could have been clarified by slicing the unnecessary words “crowded” and “some.” But here is a plain-language edit: “During the deadly six-year conflict in Syria, the most recent fighting has focused in Syria’s northern battlefield, where multiple groups have grappled for control. A United Nations agency announced on Sunday that in the last five months, 66,000 people have been displaced there—a statement issued the day after the U.S. gave armored vehicles to the Kurds for an impending push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital.” Still too complex? How about: “In Syria’s northern battlefield, once controlled by the Islamic State, multiple groups have spent five months grappling for control. On Sunday, a U.N. humanitarian agency announced that as many as 66,000 residents have been displaced in that time. The statement came a day after Kurdish-led forces, with the help of armored vehicles provided by the US, prepared to push toward a makeshift capital still controlled by IS.” To be fair, the Syrian crisis is a conflict that, unlike some, fails to fall neatly along national, racial, or ethnic lines, so it’s difficult to summarize—but therein lies the challenge for a writer and editor. (It’s also a reason that newspapers should stop cutting their copy-editing staffs, as many have been doing. Thankfully, the Washington Post looked to hire more copy editors earlier this year.) Reporters, with fewer editors to guide them, also must be careful to include background and laymen’s details. Everyone has a bubble or sphere of knowledge. It doesn’t make one person more cerebral than another, but points to differing frames of reference. I’m often amazed by those who can easily recite the rosters of 30 major-league baseball teams and tell me who’s on the DL, when I (embarrassingly) couldn’t name three players in major league baseball—but those details matter; they affect a billion dollar industry. Likewise, media professionals may falsely assume everyone shares their knowledge of government intricacies while they continue walling themselves in by a construction of political terms and legalese. These assumptions are, as we have seen, dangerously shortsighted. As citizens, we should all be able to better educate ourselves so we’re prepared for a critical situation or change in policy. Besides finding and telling important stories, the media has a weighty mandate: to craft those stories in a user-friendly way so consumers will read past the headline. Otherwise, the difficult work of investigating and writing a story sees little readership and thus, little payoff. With news outlets constantly shrinking and some dying out, there’s no part of the country that can’t benefit from more media right now, and no media that can’t benefit from more people engaged in it. So it’s important to write cover stories in such a way that they don’t all sound like “inside baseball.” In the 1993 movie Philadelphia, helmed by the recently departed Jonathan Demme, Tom Hanks’ character—a lawyer with HIV who’s fighting to get his job back—shares a frequent refrain with his attorney: “Explain it to me like I’m a six-year-old.” “Explain it to me like I’m a four-year-old.” Both men are smart enough to know that they need to understand every detail of a complex situation. News professionals, too, need to do a better job of arming readers with the background and context of an ongoing issue, rather than thickening the walls of their bubble. A reader gained is a reader better equipped to face our changing news landscape, and it’s changing so rapidly right now that we need all hands and minds on deck. Caren LissnerjournalismmedianewsnewspapersreportingsimplicitySyriaThe Washingon Postwriting  Caren Lissner Caren Lissner is the editor-in-chief of the Hudson Reporter newspaper chain in New Jersey and has written for Atlantic CityLab and the Washington Post. She's also a novelist and humor writer whose first book, Carrie Pilby, was just made into a comedy film. Her more satirical writing can be found on McSweeney's and in the Rumpus. http://carenlissner.com

Thanks 'Last Kiss' Comics

THIS IS GOOD JOURNALISM FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: How He Used Facebook to Win Sue Halpern June 8, 2017 Issue Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss Oxford University Press, 291 pp., $99.00; $27.95 (paper) Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan D. Hersh Cambridge University Press, 261 pp., $80.00; $30.99 (paper) Donald Trump Donald Trump; drawing by James Ferguson Not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, an article published in the Swiss weekly Das Magazin, and reprinted online in English by Vice, began churning through the Internet. While pundits were dissecting the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the journalists for Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, pointed to an entirely different explanation—the work of Cambridge Analytica, a data science firm created by a British company with deep ties to the British and American defense industries. According to Grassegger and Krogerus, Cambridge Analytica had used psychological data culled from Facebook, paired with vast amounts of consumer information purchased from data-mining companies, to develop algorithms that were supposedly able to identify the psychological makeup of every voter in the American electorate. The company then developed political messages tailored to appeal to the emotions of each one. As the New York Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim described it: A voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment; political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety…. Even more troubling was the underhanded way in which Cambridge Analytica appeared to have obtained its information. Using an Amazon site called Mechanical Turk, the company paid one hundred thousand people in the United States a dollar or two to fill out an online survey. But in order to receive payment, those people were also required to download an app that gave Cambridge Analytica access to the profiles of their unwitting Facebook friends. These profiles included their Facebook “likes” and their own contact lists. According to the investigative reporter Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The Intercept, a further 185,000 people were recruited from an unnamed data company, to gain access to another 30 million Facebook profiles. Again, none of these 30 million people knew their data were being harvested and analyzed for the benefit of an American political campaign. Facebook did turn out to be essential to Trump’s victory, but not in the way Grassegger, Krogerus, and Schwartz suggest. Though there is little doubt that Cambridge Analytica exploited members of the social network, Facebook’s real influence came from the campaign’s strategic and perfectly legal use of Facebook’s suite of marketing tools. (It should be noted that internal Facebook documents leaked in early May show that Facebook itself has been mining users’ emotional states and sharing that information with advertisers.) After the initial alarm that an obscure data firm might have wormed its way into the American psyche deeply enough to deliver the election to Trump, critics began to question what Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, called the firm’s “secret sauce,” the algorithms it used to predict a voter’s psychological profile, what is known as “psychographics.” Confessore and Hakim’s article about the firm, which appeared on the front page of the Times, quoted numerous consultants, working for both parties, who were dismissive of the firm’s claims. The mathematician Cathy O’Neil, in a commentary for Bloomberg, called Cambridge Analytica’s secret sauce “just more ketchup.” Using psychological traits to craft appeals to voters, she wrote, wasn’t anything new—every candidate was doing it. For decades, in fact, campaigns have been using and refining “microtargeting” techniques, looking at religious affiliations, buying habits, demographic traits, voting histories, educational attainment, magazine subscriptions, and the like, parsing the electorate in order to understand which values and issues are driving which voters. For a few election cycles starting at the turn of the century, the Republicans had the advantage, developing a database called Voter Vault that allowed party operatives to understand voters in an increasingly nuanced way. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, the Bush team surveyed a large sample of these voters to assess their attitudes and behaviors, and sorted them into thirty groups, each with similar interests, lifestyles, ideologies, and affinities. It then placed every other voter into one of these groups and developed messaging intended to appeal to each one. By 2008, however, the microtargeting advantage had shifted to the Democrats, who had developed their own enormous, dissectable database of voters called VoteBuilder, run by the Democratic National Committee, and others run by for-profit companies that had been created to support the party’s candidates. One of these, Catalist, boasts a national database of 240 million people of voting age, with information on each one drawn from voting rolls, the census, and other public records, as well as commercial data covering “hundreds of fields, including household attributes, purchasing and investment profiles, donation behavior, occupational information, recreational interests, and engagement with civic and community groups.” In 2008 and 2012, the Democrats also had more sophisticated models predicting how people with certain attributes might vote. In the course of the 2016 election, the Trump campaign ended up relying on three voter databases: the one supplied by Cambridge Analytica, with its 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans including, according to its website, personality profiles on all of them; the RNC’s enhanced Voter Vault, which claims to have more than 300 terabytes of data, including 7,700,545,385 microtargeting data points on nearly 200 million voters; and its own custom-designed one, called Project Alamo, culled in part from the millions of small donors to the campaign and e-mail addresses gathered at rallies, from sales of campaign merchandise, and even from text messages sent to the campaign. Eventually, Project Alamo also came to include data from the other two databases. A principal force behind these various strategies was Brad Parscale, who served as the digital director of the Trump campaign from the primaries through the general election and who in the late spring of 2016 hired Cambridge Analytica as part of this effort. Parscale, who works out of San Antonio, had designed websites for Trump Wineries and other Trump enterprises. Through that work he became friends with Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, who Parscale says is like a brother to him. Further binding these family ties, Parscale’s marketing and design firm, Giles-Parscale, recently hired Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, to work on Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. “My loyalty is to the family,” Parscale told the journalists Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, whose Bloomberg article “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,” on the campaign’s digital strategy, turned out to be the most prescient piece written about Trump’s stunning upset. In the early phase of the primaries, Parscale launched Trump’s digital operation by buying $2 million in Facebook ads—his entire budget at the time. He then uploaded all known Trump supporters into the Facebook advertising platform and, using a Facebook tool called Custom Audiences from Customer Lists, matched actual supporters with their virtual doppelgangers and then, using another Facebook tool, parsed them by race, ethnicity, gender, location, and other identities and affinities. From there he used Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find people with interests and qualities similar to those of his original cohort and developed ads based on those characteristics, which he tested using Facebook’s Brand Lift surveys. He was just getting started. Eventually, Parscale’s shop was reportedly spending $70 million a month on digital advertising, most of it on Facebook. (Facebook and other online venues also netted Trump at least $250 million in donations.) While it may not have created individual messages for every voter, the Trump campaign used Facebook’s vast reach, relatively low cost, and rapid turnaround to test tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of different campaign ads. According to Issie Lapowsky of Wired, speaking with Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee and a member of Trump’s digital team: On any given day…the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations. Coby calls this approach “A/B testing on steroids.” And this was just Facebook. The campaign also placed ads on other social media, including Twitter and Snapchat, and ran sponsored content on Politico. According to one estimate by a campaign insider, the Trump team spent “in the high eight figures just on persuasion.” Remarkably, none of this money was used on ads created from Cambridge Analytica’s questionably obtained Facebook data. Not long after touting the edge it gave the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica began walking back its initial claim that psychological targeting was crucial to Trump’s victory. “I don’t want to break your heart; we actually didn’t do any psychographics with the Trump campaign,” Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge Analytica’s chief data scientist, told a panel hosted by Google five weeks after the election. Because the firm was only brought onto the Trump campaign the summer before the general election, he said, “we had five months to scale extremely fast, and doing sexy psychographics profiles requires a much longer run time.” Apparently, Cambridge Analytica had deployed its psychological targeting techniques during the Republican primaries on behalf of Ted Cruz, but Cruz’s failure to win the nomination was cited as evidence that Cambridge Analytica’s models were ineffective and that the company did not understand American politics. Though Cambridge Analytica came late to American elections, its British parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), has been a client of the United States government for years. SCL has “provided intelligence assessments for American defense contractors in Iran, Libya and Syria,” according to the Times, and developed so-called influence campaigns for NATO in Afghanistan. Also in Afghanistan, SCL engaged in “target audience analysis” for the United States Department of Defense, identifying who was susceptible to American propaganda. The firm’s methodology, according to its website, has been approved by the UK Ministry of Defence, the US State Department, Sandia National Laboratories, and NATO. It seeks “to understand empirically what the right levers or ‘triggers and filters’ in a given population are, based on a penetrating psychological understanding.” SCL is currently seeking contracts with at least a dozen US agencies, and The Washington Post recently reported that it has already secured work with the State Department. Strategic Communications Laboratories may have a special advantage in these efforts now that Cambridge Analytica is largely controlled by Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s major donors. According to The Guardian, Mercer now owns 90 percent of the company, with SCL owning the remaining 10 percent. (Mercer is also the money behind Breitbart News, the website credited with serving up fake and hyped-up articles to incite Trump’s base.) Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, was on the Cambridge Analytica board until he became the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Robert Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, served on Trump’s transition team and has stayed on as a Trump adviser. She now runs Making America Great, a pro-Trump advocacy organization largely funded by her father that is dedicated to creating influence campaigns to push what has been called a nationalist—anti-immigration, anti-government—agenda. Its day-to-day director is Emily Cornell, who stepped down as Cambridge Analytica’s senior vice-president for political affairs to take the position. Alex Welsh Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, Trump Tower, New York City, October 2016 Meanwhile, as SCL pursues government contracts, Cambridge Analytica is also vying to create influence campaigns on behalf of the Trump Organization, the parent company of Trump’s various business interests. As an unnamed conservative digital strategist told The Guardian, the data from Cambridge Analytica could be helpful in both “driving sales and driving policy goals. Cambridge is positioned to be the preferred vendor for all that.” But weeks before the Mercers set up Making America Great, Brad Parscale had already created his own Trump advocacy group, called America First Policies. The creation of two independent organizations both ostensibly aimed at mustering support for Trump appears to have presaged the fault line that is now emerging between Steve Bannon and the Mercers on one side, and Jared Kushner (and by default Giles-Parscale) on the other. This division was also manifest days after the election as members of team Trump took a victory lap, with Cambridge Analytica’s Nix crediting his firm with the win, and Parscale declaring to the contrary that it was his and Kushner’s overall digital strategy that took Trump over the top. Either way, that rift pulls back the curtain on contemporary electioneering—electioneering in the age of big data and social media, both of which were crucial to Trump’s victory, and were used in innovative ways that are likely to be adopted by other candidates from both parties. As Daniel Kreiss points out in his book Prototype Politics, losing campaigns, especially, look to the winning one “to find models for future action.” There is no doubt that Trump’s digital operation—overseen by Parscale with the involvement of Giles-Parscale, Cambridge Analytica, the Republican National Committee, and scores of contractors—drew heavily on Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection playbook. Recalling that campaign, Kreiss describes how the Democrats repurposed a marketing strategy called “uplift” or “brand lift” and used it to pursue voters they identified as receptive to Obama’s message. They did so by gathering millions of data points on the electorate from public sources, commercial information brokers, and their own surveys, then polling voters with great frequency and looking for patterns in the responses. All this was used to create predictive models of who was likely to vote for Obama, who was not, and who was open to persuasion. It also indicated who would be disinclined to vote for Obama if contacted by the campaign. These models sorted individuals into categories—let’s say, mothers concerned about gun violence or millennials with significant college debt—and these categories were used to tailor communications to members of each group. Kreiss observes that such sorting was necessary because it would have been nearly impossible to create personalized messages for individuals from a labor standpoint…. And…the cost of testing individual appeals to determine whether they were actually successful in order to justify the expense of creating them would have been astronomical. In his 2015 book Hacking the Electorate, Eitan Hersh is skeptical about the value of commercial data in predicting political outcomes—his research shows that public records are crucial. Echoing Kreiss, he writes that “even in well-financed campaigns, there is rarely an interest among campaign strategists to send fifty different messages to fifty different segments of voters.” The Trump campaign, with its “A/B testing on steroids,” turned this conventional wisdom on its head. There were other digital innovations as well. On election day, for example, the Trump campaign bought all the ad space on YouTube and ran a series of five thirty-second videos, each hosted by a different Trump surrogate representing a particular segment of the Trump base. We “learned that putting Mr. Trump on persuasion ads was a bad idea,” Cambridge Analytica’s Oczkowski said in April at a meeting of the Association for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in Melbourne, Australia. Instead, there was Ivanka Trump, representing mothers and business women; Willie Robertson, the star of the television show Duck Dynasty, to appeal to southerners and hunters; Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, representing law and order and diversity (he is African-American); the former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell to appeal to veterans and their families; and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, a tough, aggressive guy’s guy. “There was no targeting,” Oczkowski explained. “Every single American who [went] to YouTube that day [saw these ads].” And, he continued, once viewers watched one of the thirty-second videos to the end, they landed on a screen with a polling place locator. “We had tens of millions of people view the videos and hundreds of thousands of people use the ‘find your polling place’ locator. When you’re talking about winning by thousands of votes, this stuff matters,” Oczkowski said. Parscale’s strategy of using Facebook’s “dark posts” also turned out to matter, enabling the Trump campaign to attack Clinton with targeted negative ads that flew below the public radar. Dark posts are not illegal. They are not necessarily “dark.” Unlike a regular Facebook advertisement, which appears on one’s timeline and can be seen by one’s friends, dark posts are invisible to everyone but the recipient. Facebook promotes them as “unpublished” posts that “allow you to test different creative variations with specific audiences without overloading people on your Page with non-relevant or repetitive messages.” Phrased this way, dark posts sound benign, even benevolent. Parscale and his crew had other ideas. Facebook dark posts, used in tandem with more traditional attack ads, were part of the Trump team’s concerted effort to dissuade potential Clinton voters from showing up at the polls. (In March, Cambridge Analytica won an Advertising Research Foundation David Ogilvy Award for its “Can’t Run Her House” ad, which used a clip from the 2008 Democratic primary of Michelle Obama criticizing Clinton.) “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior campaign official told Bloomberg’s Green and Issenberg. One targeted idealistic white liberals—primarily Bernie Sanders’s supporters; another was aimed at young women—hence the procession of women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed by the candidate herself; and a third went after African-Americans in urban centers where Democrats traditionally have had high voter turnout. One dark post featured a South Park–like animation narrated by Hillary Clinton, using her 1996 remarks about President Bill Clinton’s anti-crime initiative in which she called certain young black men “super predators” who had to be brought “to heel.” “We’ve modeled this,” the unnamed senior campaign official told Green and Issenberg. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.” And it did. Democratic turnout in battleground states was weak, which was crucial to Trump’s victory. Tallying it up three days after the election, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, noted: In Detroit, Mrs. Clinton received roughly 70,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did in 2012; she lost Michigan by just 12,000 votes. In Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, she received roughly 40,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did, and she lost the state by just 27,000. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, turnout in majority African-American precincts was down 11 percent from four years ago. Trump’s digital team was also aided by the candidate’s unbridled use of Twitter, by WikiLeaks, by fake news generators like Breitbart, and by an army of so-called “Twitter bots,” automated Twitter accounts—many of which are thought to have emanated from Russia and at least one thousand of which the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer claimed to have created. Together, all this sent a river of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages coursing into cyberspace, giving the Trump campaign a continually self-reinforcing narrative. And then there was the candidate himself and his blustery, contradictory pronouncements, often pandering to voters’ racially tinged resentments. This might have been the undoing of another candidate, but for the Trump team it turned out to be an asset. “Trump didn’t have a lot of ‘Here is my agenda, here is my narrative, I have to persuade people to it,’” Catalist’s Laura Quinn told me. The Trump world was more like, “Let’s say a lot of different things, they don’t even necessarily need to be coherent, and observe, through the wonderful new platforms that allow you to observe how people respond and observe what works, and whatever squirrel everyone chases, that’s going to become our narrative, our agenda, our message.” I’m being very simplistic, but that was the very different approach that truly was creative, different, imaginative, revolutionary—whatever you want to say. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but winning the popular vote does not automatically lead to the White House, and Trump was never going to try to appeal to the entire electorate. Applying Cambridge Analytica’s algorithms, Trump’s data scientists built a model they called Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory to rank and weight the states needed to get to 270 electoral college votes, which was used to run daily simulations of the election. Through this work, the digital team identified 13.5 million persuadable voters in sixteen battleground states, and modeled which combinations of those voters would yield the winning number. As the campaign wore on, it didn’t look good. The Trump team’s numbers were similar to those being posted by Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight website, which showed Hillary Clinton winning handily. Before the election, in a call to reporters, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica rated Trump’s chance of winning at 20 percent. Brad Parscale apparently saw it differently. “You know, I always thought we had a much better chance to win than everyone,” he told NPR’s Rachel Martin. A few weeks before the election, he said he had a hunch from reading Breitbart, Reddit, Facebook, and other nontraditional news sources, and from the campaign’s own surveys, that there were whole segments of the population—people who were angry and disaffected—that were being missed by traditional pollsters and the mainstream media. These were people who may not have voted in the past but would be a stealthy source of support were they to show up on election day. Parscale’s data scientists reweighted their model to reflect this. Once the Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory model took account of this cohort, and showed that the ones who lived in Rust Belt states had the most likely chance of delivering the presidency to Trump, Parscale’s digital team focused all its resources in those last few weeks on these voters. This included sending the candidate himself to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in the days before the election, even though those states were considered by most observers likely to be unsympathetic to him, because the reweighted Cambridge Analytica algorithms were pointing there, and those algorithms dictated the candidate’s travel schedule. “[Clinton’s] strategy was…‘if I turn out enough people in urban areas, Republicans can’t make up those numbers in rural areas,’” Cambridge Analytica’s Oczkowski explained. “Little did she know that almost every rural voter in the country was going to show up in this election.” There are many ways that the Democrats lost the election, starting with the foibles of the candidate herself. If the Republicans had lost, that would have been the prevailing story about them and their candidate as well. That the Republicans didn’t lose can be attributed in large measure to their expert manipulation of social media: Donald Trump is our first Facebook president. His team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook, as well as Google, the two biggest advertising platforms in the world, to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of Americans did not want. They understood that some numbers matter more than others—in this case the number of angry, largely rural, disenfranchised potential Trump voters—and that Facebook, especially, offered effective methods for pursuing and capturing them. While this is clearly the future of campaigns, both Republican and Democratic, it also appears to be Trump’s approach to governing. Much was made in the last days of the campaign of the fact that if Donald Trump lost, he could take his huge database, Project Alamo, which he owns outright, and start an insurgent political movement or build his own media company. As Steve Bannon said at the time, “Trump is an entrepreneur.” But Trump didn’t lose, and he still owns that database, and it continues to serve him well. In the first three months of his presidency, when only 36 percent of the country gave him a favorable rating, Trump and the Republicans raised $30 million toward his reelection. As a point of reference, this is twice as much as Obama raised in the first three months of his first term, while enjoying much higher approval ratings. What our Facebook president has discovered is that it actually pays only to please some of the people some of the time. The rest simply don’t count.

Obituary Writers: Life's Work

You still might have a future in Journalism. But it's not all that it's cracked up to be: Obituary writers: Life’s work The subjects of “Obit”, an engaging new documentary profiling obituarists at the New York Times, recognise that their lives are not exactly the stuff of stardom. They walk into their corner of the newsroom each day ignorant of their assignment; by the day’s end each staffer will have been immersed in the life of a hitherto-unknown figure. It is a compelling portrait of a profession that rarely receives the dignity it so graciously affords others

From NPR (National Public Radio) in America. It Sounds Like Science Fiction But ... It's A Cliché Listen· 4:33 April 9, 20177:51 AM ET Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday GEOFF BRUMFIEL  A scene from the 1990s Sci-Fi film Timecop, featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme (left). Ronald Siemoneit/Sygma via Getty Images In the 1994 film Timecop, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a police officer who uses a time machine to catch criminals. Time-traveling law enforcement may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but if one researcher has her way, it will soon become science fact. See what I did there? That paragraph encapsulates the most tired cliché of science writing: "It sounds like science fiction but it's true. " Sounds like Sci-Fi gets used everywhere, from CNN, to The New York Times, to yes ... here on NPR. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. The best examples usually include a reference to a mid-1990s sci-fi film, just to make crystal-clear what science fiction this particular science fact refers to. In 15 years of reporting, I've lost track of how many times I've run into "Sounds like Sci-Fi." And last year, I became a science editor here at NPR. NPR's Ethics Handbook carries a warning on cliches: "Reporters and news writers are under deadline pressure, and these are the phrases that spring to mind. The editor's job is not to let them get away with it."  And yet, like Jean-Claude Van Damme's character in Timecop, I may need to violate the very guidelines I am sworn to enforce. A big part of our job on NPR's science desk is to tell you about the latest scientific findings. That involves cramming a lot of complicated science into a very small space, and hopefully presenting it in a way that prevents your eyes from glazing over. Science fiction plays an important role in two ways. First, most people are not familiar with the latest findings on antimatter, but they do know Star Trek. So if I can use Mr. Spock to introduce the concept, then I'm giving our readers and listeners something to grab on to: a little piece of the familiar in a story that is otherwise abstruse. (In fact, new research on antimatter was the one case in recent memory where I indulged in the cliché.) Second, science fiction often revolves around the moral questions of technology. It can help the public understand potential problems before they become real. Take for example, a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9. While it's not yet well-known outside the world of science, this inscrutably-acronymed technology allows researchers to cut and paste genetic code like lines in a word-processing document. Researchers are already looking ahead to how such gene-editing might be used in humans to eliminate disease. Or, more worryingly, they could use CRISPR to create designer babies. It's the stuff of Brave New World but it's real. Actually, to keep truer to the trope, it's the stuff of the 1997 film Gattaca. And those two dystopic views of genetics are a good way to help people begin to grapple with the problems something like CRISPR might bring. We live in an era where the pace of change is quick. The lines between science fiction and science fact often blur. Science journalists will continue to pull from science fiction, and they will inevitably write the "sounds like science fiction" cliché. That doesn't mean I'll let them do it regularly on my watch. And there is one technology that exists purely as science fiction: time travel. That's why you won't see me making reference to Timecop anytime soon, either.

Should male journalists be allowed to interview female celebrities in glossy magazines?

I really love this one. When I read the headline I thought well the dick head male jornos are not educated or and trained enough to do their jobs. Enjoy: Why do so many male journalists think female stars are flirting with them? A magazine’s profile with Selena Gomez is the latest to have an icky fixation on its subject’s looks. Perhaps it’s time for men to be banned from interviewing women Monday 20 March 2017 13.41 GMT Last modified on Monday 20 March 2017 22.00 GMT Should male journalists be allowed to interview female celebrities in glossy magazines? Legally? Debatable. Ethically? Also debatable! This perennial issue has arisen again because of a small furore around a male journalist’s interview with Selena Gomez in a US fashion magazine. Honestly, this piece is pretty restrained, with only a couple of references to the male journalist feeling “protective” of the mega celebrity with her “doll-like” looks and “tiny waist.” But really, I can’t get wildly het up about it when there are SO MANY more egregious examples. I have been a connoisseur of male journalists’ interviews with female celebrities for several decades now, collecting them as pieces of evidence for my soon-to-be published epic tome, The Male Ego: Beyond Belief. My interest was first piqued by an interview fellow 90s kids might remember, Rich Cohen’s 1995 profile of Alicia Silverstone in Rolling Stone, which opened with the promising sentence, “Alicia Silverstone is a kittenish 18-year-old movie star whom lots of men want to sleep with.” Great start, Rich! As your alter ego Ron Burgundy, would say, compelling and rich. Please, keep going: “Silverstone is a girl you could conceivably date – ” Could you, Rich? COULD YOU? I apologise, please continue – “a girl you did date, even, raised to the highest power. She has the brand new look of a still-wet painting – touch her and she’ll smudge.” Twenty years on, Cohen is still specialising in typing with one hand as proven by his Vanity Fair profile of Margot Robbie, in which he boldly decrees: “She can be sexy and composed while naked but only in character.” Well, it’s hard to compose a sentence that makes sense when all your blood has rushed to the opposite end of your body from your brain. Robbie later described the piece, with admirable understatement, as “really weird”, and, while Cohen ends his article, appearing to be musing about having sex with her, Robbie says she walked away thinking, “That was a really odd interview”. What was odd about it, Margot? He was just thinking about having sex with you. God, stuck up much? But I think my favourite was US Esquire on Scarlett Johansson: “I didn’t look at her ass,” the male journalist informs us. “I don’t know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn’t.” Of course she wanted you to, you fool! It is every woman’s fantasy to be ogled by a tragic male journalist while she tries to do her job. And it’s not just magazine journalists, of course. Let us all remember, again, the sportswriter who began his interview with an Olympic swimmer with: “The first thing to say about Fran Halsall is that she is beautiful … I was mesmerised.” This was after another article in which he claimed, definitively, “There has always been a soft-porn dimension to women’s tennis,” which is true, because we all know that Serena Williams is only there for your pleasure, male journalist. But what about the women journalists, you cry? Great question, you! Well, the funny thing is female journalists do not – in my 17-year experience of being one and 25-year experience of reading their work – think male celebrities want to sleep with them and don’t use interviews as an excuse to lech over them. If anything, they’re more likely to poke fun at them, because they get that celebrities generally are ludicrous as opposed to, I don’t know, sexual escorts. In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s brilliant interview with Tom Hiddleston in last month’s US GQ, she teased out his private-school shallowness, and even when he turned up the next morning at her hotel room, she did not think – as a male journalist would have done in a reverse situation – that he was trying to sleep with her. She got that he just wanted to make sure she understood something (the something in this case being that his relationship with Taylor Swift was, despite all appearances to the contrary, real). Then there was Anna Peele’s excellent interview with Miles Teller in US Esquire in which she unforgettably skewered his pretentiousness. Doing interviews is weird. I’ve been doing them for a long time now and there is, no question, something vaguely prostitutional about it: there you are, the journalist/client, demanding this far more beautiful person simulate intimacy with you for an hour. Readers seem to get this on some level because one of the most common questions I get asked about my job is if I’ve ever slept with an interviewee, and obviously the answer is no, never even close, partly because I’m too busy worrying if my Dictaphone is working to even think about sex, but mainly because I know both the interviewee and I are just doing our jobs. When Paul Rudd tells me he likes my dress, or Idris Elba asks where my name is from, I have, thank God, the self-awareness to know they are diligently making pleasant chat so that I write how nice they are and tell people to see their movies. I do not think, “Yup, they DEFINITELY want a piece of this.” I don’t know why so many men find it hard to understand female interviewees are not genuinely flirting with them. That ol’ male ego, I guess. Or maybe being in a room with a beautiful woman who in normal circumstances would take out restraining orders against them addles their brain to such an extent that they can no longer tell the difference between their pen and their penis. Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com. Topics Fashion 
Ask Hadley Celebrity 
Magazines 
Newspapers & magazines 
features Full disclosure: I became and adult male and a journalist in the 1960's and was worse then anything you can dream of today. Can you teach old dogs new tricks, well yes you can.

In the Trump Era, Censorship May Start in the Newsroom

MEDIA In Trump Era, Censorship May Start in the Newsroom Mediator Jim Rutenberg MEDIATOR FEB. 17, 2017 Rick Casey, the host of a weekly public affairs program on a small television station in Texas, recently fashioned a stinging commentary on remarks by Representative Lamar Smith that was pulled shortly before it was to air. The station later reversed itself. Credit Josh Huskin for The New York Times This is how the muzzling starts: not with a boot on your neck, but with the fear of one that runs so deep that you muzzle yourself. Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a press-bullying president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy your reputation by falsely calling your journalism “fake.” Maybe it’s the line you hold back from your script or your article because it could trigger a federal leak investigation into you and your sources (so, yeah, jail). Or, maybe it’s the commentary you spike because you’re a publicly supported news channel and you worry it will cost your station its federal financing. Mediator A column by Jim Rutenberg about our shifting media landscape When a Pillar of the Fourth Estate Rests on a Trump-Murdoch Axis FEB 12 The Massacre That Wasn’t, and a Turning Point for ‘Fake News’ FEB 5 A Muckraker Who Was Eulogized Even by His Targets JAN 29 ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality JAN 22 Bill Maher Isn’t High on Trump: The State of Free Speech in a New Era JAN 15 See More » In that last case, your fear would be existential — a matter of your very survival — and your motivation to self-censor could prove overwhelming. We no longer have to imagine it. We got a real-life example last week in San Antonio, where a PBS station sat atop the slippery slope toward censorship and then promptly started down it. It’s a single television station in a single state in a very big country. And the right thing ultimately happened. But only after a very wrong thing happened. The editorial misfire bears retelling because it showed the most likely way that the new administration’s attempts to shut down the free press could succeed, just as it shows how those attempts can be stopped. The story began with a Jan. 24 speech that Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, gave on the House floor regarding what he described as the unfair way the national media was covering President Trump. He said for instance that the media ignored highs in consumer confidence, which of course it did not. And he ended with an admonition for his constituents: “Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” His remarks caught the notice, and the ire, of a longtime San Antonio-area journalist and commentator, Rick Casey, who hosts a weekly public affairs program “Texas Week” on KLRN. He ends each week’s show with his own commentary, which also runs in The San Antonio Express-News. Mr. Casey has been able to work for “40 years as a professional smart ass,” he told me, because “I’m not really a bomb thrower — I’ve watched politicians for so many years that I know how to be strong about something without being unfriendly.” But Mr. Smith’s comments bothered him enough that he wrote up a stemwinder of a closing commentary. “Smith’s proposal is quite innovative for America,” it went. “We’ve never really tried getting all our news from our top elected official. It has been tried elsewhere, however. North Korea comes to mind.” All set to go, the commentary was mentioned in a Facebook promotion for the show, which in turn caught the eye of Mr. Smith’s office, which called the station to inquire about the segment. Forty minutes before the show aired, the station’s president and chief executive, Arthur Rojas Emerson, left a message for Mr. Casey saying he was pulling the commentary and replacing it with an older one. Mr. Casey told me he missed the call, but saw what happened with his own eyes. At a meeting the next Monday, Mr. Casey said, Mr. Emerson expressed concern “that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was under attack and that this would add to it.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides financing for public stations, including KLRN, and Mr. Trump’s election has heightened fears that its financing will be cut. It also happens that Mr. Emerson had left journalism for several years to run his own advertising firm and that Mr. Smith had at one point been a client. Mr. Casey says he asked Mr. Emerson if he’d be willing to come on the program and discuss it all, but Mr. Emerson declined. And that seemed to be that. But as we’re learning this year, journalism has a safety net in the people who appreciate it, and the people who work in it. First, when Mr. Casey’s commentary ran as planned in The San Antonio Express-News, astute readers noticed it was different than the previous night’s televised commentary. The story of what happened began traveling around San Antonio journalism circles, making its way to the Express-News columnist Gilbert Garcia, who shared the details last Friday. Another titan of Texas journalism, Evan Smith, who co-founded The Texas Tribune and regularly appears on Mr. Casey’s program, noticed Mr. Garcia’s column while he was in Washington. “I had a hot coffee in my hand and I came very close to dropping it,” Mr. Smith told me. “Holding people accountable in public life is so fundamentally important that this idea that somehow we’re going to stop doing that because we’re worried about what the government’s going to do to us, I so unbelievably reject that.” As it happened, Evan Smith was in Washington for a meeting of the PBS national board, on which he sits, and “I certainly got into the board room and talked to people in the system.” He also called Mr. Emerson, and told him “I didn’t see why The Tribune or I should continue to be associated with this show or this station.” By late last week, Mr. Emerson had agreed to let Mr. Casey’s original segment run this Friday, as long as it included a new “commentary” label that will run with his opinion segments. When I caught up with Mr. Emerson this week he acknowledged making “a mistake” that should not tarnish a career spent mostly in broadcast news, starting in a $1.25-an-hour job as a cameraman. “I had to make a decision in what was about 20 minutes,” he said. He acknowledged that “clearly we always worry about funding for public television,” but said that wasn’t the “principal reason” for his decision to hold back the commentary. “We have to protect the neutrality of the station — somebody could have looked at it as slander,” he said. The “commentary” label, he said, would take care of it. Mr. Casey is satisfied with the result. But he acknowledged that it was a close call and that he was uniquely qualified to push back in a way others might not be. “I’m lucky to be in the position of being 70 years old, and not in the position of being 45,” he said, meaning that job security was not the same issue. “There’s no level of heroism here.” In a week in which Congress is calling for a leak investigation into stories in The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN that led to Michael T. Flynn’s forced resignation as national security adviser, heroism is what’s called for. Hopefully there’s enough of it to go around. Zach Wichter contributed research. A version of this article appears in print on February 18, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Newsroom Risk in the Trump Era: Self-Censorship.In

Hacking Journalists

If you ever thought that journalism wasn't important then why do you think government states are hacking and attacking journalists. Accurate correct news reporting is essential- "State-sponsored Hackers Targeting Prominent Journalists, Google Warns (politico.com) 99 Posted by msmash on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:40PM from the security-woes dept. State-sponsored hackers are attempting to steal email passwords of a number of prominent journalists, Google has warned. The hackers are suspected to be Russians, reports POLITICO. Some of the journalists who have received such warnings from Google as recent as two-to-three weeks ago include Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, Julia Ioffe, who recently started at The Atlantic, Ezra Klein of Vox, and CNN's Brian Stelter. From the report: "The fact that all this started right after the election suggests to me that journalists are the next wave to be targeted by state-sponsored hackers in the way that Democrats were during it," said one journalist who got the warning. "I worry that the outcome is going to be the same: Someone, somewhere, is going to get hacked, and then the contents of their Gmail will be weaponized against them -- and by extension all media."

Valentine Wish from the best

Bill Maher Valentine message we should heed, fall in love with knowledge again (VIDEO) FEBRUARY 11, 2017 BY EGBERTO WILLIES Bill Maher’s new rules hit the nail on the head. It is a serious message told amusingly, but one we should heed. Bill Maher suggests falling in love with knowledge America is on a dangerous, self-destructive sliding slope of ignorance. Bill Maher’s Valentine message is one many have been trying to tell. “I did fall in love with books, and ideas, and knowledge,” Bill Maher said. “There is no doubt that it is a truly kind of love affair when you go off to a place where you have intellectual epiphanies because learning is so revered. And the celebrities are the smartest people. I may not have been able to get a blow job in college, but I got my mind blown on a regular basis. But you know, that was another country. One of the saddest things about the one we live in now is that we don’t seem to want smart people in our lives anymore. Smart Presidents? We can’t have that. Scientists? What do they know? Newspaper editors? Liars. Fake news. You know people use to get their news from newspapers. Because professional newsrooms to separating fact from fiction seriously. And employed people who had studied how to do that. But now people get their news on Facebook by sharing. Or as it used to be called, hearsay. Why waste money on a subscription to a newspaper when they would just blow it on war correspondents, on the Ben Bradleys of the world who brought a president to his knees way before Monica Lewinsky did. /67454881/EW_336X280_INPOST A student in a social media focus group once said ‘If the news is important, it will find me,’ except it doesn’t. And that is how we ended up with President Bannon and his dummy Donnie. It’s not surprising that it can’t find you since on social media news competes with videos of Russian car crashes, creepy clowns, and a Rabbi doing a mannequin challenge. And you know how they say you can’t make this shit up. It turns out you can. By election day last year, the top fake news on Facebook was getting more shares, clicks, and comments than the real news. Millions of people believed some straight up bullshit that the Pope had endorsed Trump when in fact after Trump won what the Pope said was ‘I am praying for his enlightenment.’ To which God said, ‘I’ve done a lot of miracles, but give me a fucking break.’ We used to respect scientists. That’s why every stoner in the seventies had a poster of Einstein on the wall. But now only thirty-six percent of Americans say they have a lot of trusts that information from scientists is reliable. While ninety-eight percent of scientists say humans evolved over the millennia. But that view is shared by not nearly as many real Americans. Trump supporters don’t think species can change over time. But they do think Trump used to be all about himself but now he is working for us. This Valentines Day can we please fall in love with knowledge again? You know under President Obama the Secretary of Energy was first a Nobel prize winner, and then a nuclear physicist. Not that Trump’s pick for the job does not have impressive credentials. [Rick Perry on Dancing with the Stars displayed] How did it happen? We went from being led by the smartest person in the world to the biggest jackass on Twitter.” Let’s encourage all to fall in love with knowledge again.

11 Stories These Journalists Wished They Had Written.

Damn, We Wish We’d Written These 11 Stories By FiveThirtyEight Filed under 2016 In Review Published Dec 28, 2016 Every year, Bloomberg News publishes a “Jealousy List” — the stories Bloomberg staffers wish they had published. It’s a delightful and endearing concept, and one that makes us incredibly — what’s that word? — envious. So, here are the stories other folks published in 2016 that made the FiveThirtyEight staff super duper jelly. arrow-1 “Will I Know Anyone At This Party?” By This American Life “You don’t think there’s Sharia? I’m just blown away. We’re living on two different planets,” South Dakota state Rep. Al Novstrup tells reporter Zoe Chace about 45 minutes into the Oct. 28 episode of This American Life. Chace and Novstrup came to their conversation with an entirely different set of facts. (Zoe’s facts happen to be the accurate ones.) It’s an exchange that makes explicit much of the divide that fueled the 2016 election, and I found Zoe’s piece to be one of the best pieces of journalism produced this year. It made me think Americans are retreating to separate worldviews while at the same time becoming more convinced that they are well informed. –Jody Avirgan, podcast editor arrow-2 “Spies in the Skies” By Peter Aldhous & Charles Seife, Buzzfeed This story has some of the most striking cartography that appeared all year, showing the flight paths of 200 federal planes circling U.S. cities as part of Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security monitoring programs. The visualizations are as beautiful as they are discomforting – who’s watching me from above right now? –Reuben Fischer-Baum, visual journalist arrow-3 “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns” By Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ “Just a small fraction of murders in cities are ever solved.” That line makes its obligatory appearance in almost every story about urban gun violence, but rarely does any story explain why so few cases ever reach investigative resolution. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns” does just that. Laskas blends the absurdity of a federal agency banned from using computers to do its job with the can-do attitude of resourceful public servants navigating the powerful gun lobby; the result is a gripping story about the unexpected connections between a brick building in a small West Virginia town, the uniquely American ethos around gun ownership and the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. –Anna Maria Barry-Jester, science reporter arrow-4 All things Todd Schneider, but especially “A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bike Rides By Todd Schneider, toddwschneider.com Writers at FiveThirtyEight have a wonderful group of editors and visual journalists working to make every story smarter, clearer and nicer to look at. Todd Schneider has Todd Schneider. Yet this year, the Genius software developer, who works on his personal, eponymous site in his spare time, produced a mammoth analysis of the mammoth data set of New York City bike-share rides, covering everything from how fast riders go by age and gender, to how weather affects ridership, to how private the data really is. Oh, and he also published a great breakdown of “Simpsons” data this year. –Carl Bialik, reporter arrow-5 “Six maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure” By Tim Meko, The Washington Post Tim Meko’s maps of the infrastructure underpinning our nation are genius in their simplicity. Plus, they’re gorgeous. –Ella Koeze, visual journalist arrow-2 “Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half” By David Robinson, Variance Explained I’m jealous of this piece by David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, who conducted an analysis that showed it was likely you could differentiate between @realDonaldTrump tweets sent by Trump himself and tweets sent by his staff by looking at whether the tweet was from an iPhone or Android device. Robinson looked at characteristics that differed between @realDonaldTrump’s Android and iPhone tweets, including time of day, use of quotation marks and links, the content of the tweets, use of hashtags and sentiment. The investigation, replete with code snippets, graphs and nerdy footnotes — as well as a GitHub link to the full source code behind his analysis — provides substantial evidence that the Android tweets may indeed be from Trump himself. –Dhrumil Mehta, data journalist arrow-4 “Gawker Media’s Biggest Mistakes” By Ashley Feinberg, Gawker On the eve of Gawker’s last day, Ashley Feinberg dredged up all the story ideas she unsuccessfully pitched to editors there (a review of “Mein Kampf,” “Which Famous Dead Person Do You Love More”). It confirmed my suspicion that Gawker was as fun to work at as it was to read. The follow-up is hilarious, too. –Gus Wezerek, designer arrow-1 “This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?” By Josh Keller and Adam Pearce, The New York Times The Upshot’s analysis of the new geography of imprisonment in the U.S. is revelatory and a perfect example of what we at FiveThirtyEight call an “outlier story” — a piece of reportage that explains a phenomenon by focusing on one of its extreme cases. Dearborn County, Indiana, has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country and is emblematic of an upward trend in inmates per capita in rural areas, even as those numbers have dropped dramatically in cities. Told through a combination of analysis, visualization, mapping and shocking prison sentence comparisons based on some very smart reporting, this story is the full package — and it really bums me out it didn’t appear on FiveThirtyEight. –Ritchie King, data visualization editor arrow-3 “The Future of Shopping: Trapping You In A Club You Didn’t Know You Joined” By Rebecca Greenfield and Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg News I love this story. It’s an exhaustively researched piece that busts up a single bad actor, Adore Me, an online lingerie store, while addressing a longstanding issue in an expanding business model — subscription services that automatically renew. The history is fascinating, the data is enlightening and the art is a delight. After reading it, I started questioning how I spent my own money. –Walter Hickey, culture writer arrow-5 “‘You Want A Description of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem” By Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times This Los Angeles Times investigation was a fascinating and thorough look at OxyContin and opioid addiction. It’s a fantastic piece of reporting and writing, using people, documents and data to tell a critically important story. –Blythe Terrell, science editor arrow-4 Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You By Julia Angwin, Terry Parris Jr. and Surya Mattu, ProPublica We all know that algorithms are playing an ever-greater role in our lives. And many of us have a sense that these algorithms can have worrisome and unintended (or occasionally intended) consequences. But in a series of stories, Julia Angwin and her team at ProPublica put into human terms how little-understood snippets of computer code are increasingly influencing both our online and offline lives. –Ben Casselman, economics editor CORRECTION (Dec. 28, 9:25 a.m.): A previous version of this article misstated the location of Dearborn County. It is in Indiana, not Illinois.

Fake and Real

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting By JOHN HERRMANNOV. 18, 2016  Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq and a critic of Donald J. Trump, was smeared in articles on pro-Trump sites. Credit Elsa/Getty Images Something is deeply wrong when the pope’s voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as “a fantasy news site” to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares. The attention paid to fake news since the election has focused largely on fabrications and outright lies, because they are indefensible, easy to identify and extraordinarily viral. Fake news is created by the kinds of people who, when asked, might call their work satire, or admit that they’re in it for the money or for the thrill of deception. Theirs is a behavior that can and should be shunned, and that Facebook is equipped, and maybe willing, to deal with. For many people, and especially opponents of President-elect Donald J. Trump, the attention paid to fake news and its role in the election has provided a small relief, the discovery of the error that explains everything. But as the attention has spread widely — even President Obama talked passionately about it on Thursday — it may lead to an unwanted outcome for those who see it not just as an explanation, but also as a way to correct the course. It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force. False news stories posted on fly-by-night websites were prevalent in this election. So, too, were widely shared political videos — some styled as newscasts — containing outright falsehoods, newslike image memes posted by individuals and shared by millions, and endlessly shared quotes and video clips of the candidates themselves repeating falsehoods. During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else. I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump. The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them. This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.” Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself. As the campaign progressed, criticism of Mr. Trump was instantly projected back at his opponent, or at the critics themselves. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained. Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms. This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen. “Fake news” as shorthand will almost surely be returned upon the media tenfold. The fake news narrative, as widely understood and deployed, has already begun to encompass not just falsified, fabricated stories, but a wider swath of traditional media on Facebook and elsewhere. Fox News? Fake news. Mr. Trump’s misleading claims about Ford keeping jobs in America? Fake news. The entirety of hyperpartisan Facebook? Fake news. This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are. Facebook may try to address the narrow version of the problem, the clearly fabricated posts. Facebook has plenty of tools at its disposal and has already promised to use one, to bar sites that have been flagged as promoting falsified content from using its advertising platform. But the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway. Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces. Facebook tried this, to a very limited extent, with Trending Topics. Members of the company’s editorial staff wrote descriptions of trending news stories, accompanied by links they deemed credible. This initiative collapsed in a frenzy of bias accusations and political fear. But it is easy to imagine a system in which a story, upon reaching some high threshold of shares, or a source, upon reaching some cumulative audience, could be audited and declared unreliable. This could resemble Facebook’s short-lived experiment to tag satire articles as such. A number of narrow measures could stop a fake story about the pope, for example. But where would that leave the rest of the media? Answered and rebutted, and barely better positioned against everything else that remained. It would be a still-dominant news environment in which almost everything there before remained intact, the main difference being that it would have all been declared, implicitly, not fake. Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and voting, and yet one where negative inputs are scarcely possible, and where conflict is resolved with isolation. (Not that provisions for open conflict on a platform present any easy alternatives: For Twitter, it has been a source of constant crisis.) Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy — more closely, perhaps, than most of the organizations that are identifying them. Their removal will be an improvement. The outrage at their mere existence, and at their promotion on a platform with the stated goal of connecting the world, will have been justified. But the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force, not despite Facebook but because of it. The company that created the system that resulted in hoax news stories should try to eliminate them, and with any luck it will. But the system stands to remain intact. Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns despite, or perhaps because of, its being credited with causing those concerns. Some have come to the realization that this was mistaken, even absurd. Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

According to Snopes, Fake News is Not the Problem-Failing Media Is.

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem Take it from the internet’s chief myth busters: The problem is the failing media. Snopes Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment? Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff. Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist. Verdict: FALSE. This is the state of truth on the internet in 2016, now that it is as easy for a Macedonian teenager to create a website as it is for The New York Times, and now that the information most likely to find a large audience is that which is most alarming, not most correct. In the wake of the election, the spread of this kind of phony news on Facebook and other social media platforms has come under fire for stoking fears and influencing the election’s outcome. Both Facebook and Google have taken moves to bar fake news sites from their advertising platforms, aiming to cut off the sites’ sources of revenue. But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.” The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. “When you’re on your fifth story of the day and there’s no editor because the editor’s been fired and there’s no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don’t have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up,” she says. Founded two decades ago to debunk urban legends, Snopes has grown into a major correction operation with an editorial staff of nearly a dozen people sifting through the internet for news that smells fishy. No, delayed military absentee ballots would not have swung the election. No, Melania Trump has not filed for divorce, nor was her husband born in Pakistan. No, Mike Pence definitely did not tell Fox News that gay conversion therapy saved his marriage. Snopes reporters often choose stories to investigate based on their own web reading. “You know, some of us are just inaccuracy snobs, but some of us are ideologues, too,” Binkowski says. She certainly falls into that camp. “I believe in sunlight being the best disinfectant, and I believe in the power of the truth,” she says. The incendiary made-up headlines are often the most straightforward falsehoods to identify. “Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it’s such obvious bullshit,” she says. “A site will have something buried somewhere on it that says, ‘This is intended to be satire. Don’t sue us.’” Binkowski says the more important work involves setting the record straight at legitimate publications that get things wrong. For example, in December, a story about El Chapo threatening ISIS appeared in the New York Post, on Forbes, and in the Washington Times, among other outlets. It didn’t sit right with a Snopes reporter, yet news outlets were reporting — and rereporting — the story. Binkowski had spent a portion of her professional journalistic career covering the border region between Mexico and the United States. “If El Chapo had made a statement like this, I would have heard about it because I’m in contact with all these Zapatista groups in Mexico,” she says. So she tracked down the original author of the information, a Brit who had written the piece as satire. “He was like, ‘I didn’t think this was going to go viral. I guess I just really nailed that El Chapo narrative,’” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you sure did.’” Snopes published a story in which the author said that the El Chapo story was satire and he’d never intended it to get so big. As a result, the duped publications ran corrections. Binkowski also points to the challenges the media face in relaying complex information quickly and accurately. To help, recently Snopes has begun to publish important news-related information as a resource for journalists and others. Last week, for example, Binkowski wrote a piece about how the electoral college functions that served as a reference for other reporters writing about the election. “It’s really complex stuff that you can’t just read about and then write about,” she says. “We’re going to be doing more of that.” Two decades into its existence, Snopes has built a strong brand as a credible myth buster. If you aren’t sure whether something is true, Google it. If a Snopes link is among your first search results, it’s probably not. Even so, corrections rarely get the attention the original stories generate. Against the viral tidal wave of misinformation, it can be hard to tell how much impact the Snopes team is having. “The only thing that we are doing that we can really keep doing is: just say the truth again and again and again and again and again, and just keep doing it,” says Binkowski. “You have to really have a specific type of personality to not want to just go back to bed.”