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Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
How to find local news you can trust
Monday, May 8, 2023
The Guardian: "The digital media bubble has burst. Where does the industry go from here?"
"Toward the end of Traffic, a new account of the early rock n roll years of internet publishing, Ben Smith writes that the failings of Buzzfeed News had come about as a result of a “utopian ideology, from a kind of magical thinking”.No truer words, perhaps, for a digital-based business that for a decade paddled in a warm bath of venture capital funding but never fully controlled its pricing and distribution, a basic business requirement that applies to information as much as it does to selling lemonade in the school yard or fossil fuels.Buzzfeed News, a pioneer of the internet news business that walked away with a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2021, said it was shutting down its newsroom on 20 April after shares in the company tumbled 90% since the company went public. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti said the company “can no longer continue to fund” the site.But that was just one of the pieces of bad news hitting the digital media sector."
Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required) ->
Sunday, August 28, 2022
More Perfect Union: 057 - The Local News Crisis (audio)
In this episode, the group is joined by Stephen Sherlock of Franklin Matters, Alan Earls of the Franklin Observer, and Martin Luttrell, former long-time reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, to dive into the issue of "The Local News Desert" - the dissolution of smaller local news outlets, discussing the decline of readership seen by newspapers, the economics of small businesses, the importance journalism plays in your community and the online future for regional reporting.
If you'd like to learn more about Steve Sherlock and the news Franklin Matters brings to the Franklin community, you can visit their here: https://www.franklinmatters.org/
If you'd like to learn more about Alan Earls and the reporting done from Franklin Observer, you can visit them here: https://franklinobserver.town.news/
Audio file -> https://more-perfect-union.captivate.fm/episode/057-the-local-news-crisis
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| Franklin.TV: A More Perfect Union (audio) |
Monday, July 18, 2022
Reminder: first session of "How to Spot Misinformation Online" Monday, Jul 18 at 1 PM
Join Steve Sherlock to walk through an online course from the Poynter Institute and MediaWise on how to spot misinformation online.
Sign up at the Senior Center to participate for these session whether in person or via Zoom.
When:
Monday, July 18 - 1 PM (part 1)
Monday, July 25 - 1 PM (part 2)
“This free short course from MediaWise for Seniors will teach you how to tell what’s true and false on the internet. By looking at examples of political, health, travel and climate misinformation, you will learn techniques for identifying false information and how to seek out trustworthy sources.
Christiane Amanpour, Joan Lunden, Lester Holt, Hari Sreenivasan and Dave Jorgenson — MediaWise Ambassadors — will also pop in to share their advice as experienced journalists to help you navigate information on platforms like Google, Facebook and more.”
The online course is listed as taking 1-2 hours. We have scheduled 2 one hour sessions to allow for discussion and following links to research current examples along the way.
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| How to Spot Misinformation Online - 2 sessions at Franklin Senior Center |
You can register with Poynter Institute and take the course on your own
If you want to attend via Zoom please use the form here -> https://forms.gle/QzD4b9qwZayM42cv9
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
How to Spot Misinformation Online - 2 sessions at Franklin Senior Center - Jul 18 & 25
Join Steve Sherlock to walk through an online course from the Poynter Institute and MediaWise on how to spot misinformation online.
Sign up at the Senior Center to participate for these session whether in person or via Zoom.
When:
Monday, July 18 - 1 PM (part 1)
Monday, July 25 - 1 PM (part 2)
“This free short course from MediaWise for Seniors will teach you how to tell what’s true and false on the internet. By looking at examples of political, health, travel and climate misinformation, you will learn techniques for identifying false information and how to seek out trustworthy sources.
Christiane Amanpour, Joan Lunden, Lester Holt, Hari Sreenivasan and Dave Jorgenson — MediaWise Ambassadors — will also pop in to share their advice as experienced journalists to help you navigate information on platforms like Google, Facebook and more.”
The online course is listed as taking 1-2 hours. We have scheduled 2 one hour sessions to allow for discussion and following links to research current examples along the way.
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| How to Spot Misinformation Online - 2 sessions at Franklin Senior Center |
You can register with Poynter Institute and take the course on your own
Monday, March 14, 2022
The Guardian provides another view to US news
A couple of good articles on topics we don't always find in the US new media
"How COVID shook the US: eight charts that capture the last two years"
Death is a topic not well discussed and perhaps even more so when associated with COVID-19. The counting process can be problematic. Everyone needs to be using the same definitions and even in MA, the definition of a COVID death is changing. One thing is clear, the disease is deadly.
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| one of the 8 charts in the article |
Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)
"Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media"
"Even in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.It was the worst elementary school shooting in American history.Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror."
Continue reading the article online (subscription maybe required)
Note: my wife taught kindergarten for 20+ years here in Franklin so the Sandy Hook tragedy hits close to home.
Note: my wife taught kindergarten for 20+ years here in Franklin so the Sandy Hook tragedy hits close to home.
Thursday, February 10, 2022
“What do you think is the strongest argument for the other side?”
"In recent years, the number of nonprofits and initiatives that could be categorized under a concept called “bridging” has expanded in the U.S.: Millions of Conversations, The People’s Supper and Good Conflict are just a few. Some efforts build on conflict resolution practices at a large scale (think social psychology) or individual (think marriage counseling), and all aim to create strong conditions for talking and working together across various fault lines.Looking at this expanding list, it’s easy to wonder what journalists — who are faced with their own challenges in reaching people with shared conversation and facts — might learn from them. But why, amid all other pressures on their work and livelihood, might they want to?"
Continue reading the article online
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/articles/journalism-bridging-monica-guzman/ |
| https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/articles/journalism-bridging-monica-guzman/ |
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| MÓNICA GUZMÁN - BRIDGE BUILDER | AUTHOR | JOURNALIST |
Sunday, December 26, 2021
How the Media Covered Voting Rights in 2020
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Monday, September 27, 2021
Dan Rather: We Need a New Vocabulary For Our Politics...
Terminology is always key. I have told a story that grass is green, Your grass maybe greener than mine or vice versa, but we both know 'green grass'. When it comes to ordering a particular shade of green, the color match becomes critical and the terminology plays more of a role. Emerald green, lime green, dark green... You get the point.
Why have I started this post with a picture of an old telephone? Because I've been thinking a lot lately that what we call a "phone" today is nothing like what we used to call a phone. I know this is no great revelation, but bear with me for a moment, because I believe there is a strong parallel to be made between this observation and what we are seeing in our current political world, and how we talk about it. Simply put, we use vocabulary from the past to talk about the present in a way that can, if we are not careful, be very distorting. Much like the powerful computer/camera/reader/flashlight/alarm clock/tracking device we carry around in our purses or pockets has only a tangential relation to traditional notions of the telephone, the nomenclature we use to reference political parties, the courts, and the other institutions of our civic life is equally tenuous. Democrats, Republicans, moderates, liberals, conservatives - we use these terms as if they are rooted and unchanging in their definitions, like, say, mountains, oceans, or apples. But there is a big difference between the words we use to describe the constructions of human society and those we use for nature. When it comes to how we live and interact, we are agents of increasingly rapid change. We use words to try to create common understandings and tie the present to the past. But broad terms cover up the diversity of the human experience, and how things change over time. People live in "homes" all over the world. But a "house" in one place can be very different from a "house" somewhere else. And certainly our homes today are similar but also very different from the houses of the past. The conservation of the terms we use for politics distorts how quickly our politics can and has changed. We must remember we are a very young country. Only 245 years (a little over three average modern American lifespans) separates our current time from the Declaration of Independence. For me, at least, that fact never ceases to shock. It resonates how much we have changed, and how quickly. We need to really think hard about how antiquated some of our descriptions for our current state of affairs have become. Let's start with who makes up the citizenship of our country. It is nothing like what it was, even in the not-too-distant past. We are much more diverse, by any metric you could think of. We are also more urban, more educated, and more mobile. And yet there is a strong bias to think of "average Americans" as those who would be conjured up in decades past. Proof of this can be found in the seeming obsession by the political press to hunker down for interviews with voters in rural diners. These Americans are asked their opinion about the direction of the country a lot more than a young immigrant in the Bronx. Because political parties are tied to voters, the changes noted above have also led to tremendous change around what it means to be a Democrat and Republican. When I was younger, we talked of the "solid South," which referred to the lock the Democrats had on the Southern states - a legacy of the Civil War. Looking at present political maps, the red-blue divide looks very different. The South is Republican, which again has a lot to do with race and the legacy of the Civil War, except that the affiliation of the political parties has changed. In 2020, however, Biden won two Southern states - Virginia (which has become an increasingly blue state) and also Georgia. That's because states change as well. Both of those states increasingly have become places that draw an educated workforce to cities and suburbs, and this cohort has become more reliably Democratic voters. So yes we can talk about Georgia and Virginia as part of the South, or even part of the original 13 colonies, but what that means for today is different from what it meant in the past. In a counter example, West Virginia was once one of the most Democratic states in the union and now it is one of the most Republican. Once one acknowledges all this churn it brings into question some of the other descriptive terminology we tend to use. What really is a conservative, a liberal, a moderate? How can you be a conservative and care nothing about conserving the planet? How can you be called a moderate and do nothing to moderate the greatest assault on democracy in generations? Is it a liberal value to adhere to the science of vaccines? This idea of conservative and liberal becomes even more strained when we try to apply it to the courts, particularly the current Supreme Court. We talk about the "conservative" justices, as if they are holding back the mobs to protect the sanctity of the Constitution. In reality they are laying waste to settled Constitutional rights and condoning attacks on our democratic process. Doesn't seem very conservative to me. I would humbly suggest that journalists in particular pay attention to these questions of semantics. Because what you call something matters. It shapes how the public sees reality. The term "liberal" might suggest a movement that is unrestrained, whereas "conservative" might suggest a movement that is secure and grounded. Is that really an accurate portrayal of Democrats and Republicans today? Even the idea of two equal political parties simply vying for votes, Democrats this and Republicans that, is a mischaracterization of what each of these parties has become and how they function. Political parties in our history have had leaders, but they have not been cults of personality. The terminology of a "party" suggests a core set of beliefs, a platform on which candidates run, even if they do not agree on all the issues. But today's Republicans are less a party than a mass movement with fealty to a would-be authoritarian. They didn't even try to produce a platform for the 2020 campaign. Instead, their voters, in a party that long championed "family values," embraced a man who was morally bankrupt. This included a vast majority of white, evangelical voters. Similarly, the party that piously lectured on fiscal responsibility when Democrats wanted to spend money, eagerly opened the checkbook to a grifter. It is understandable that we seek to hold on to familiar terms to try to make sense of the present. That's how language works. We need some common points of comprehension. And languages do evolve. But it takes time. Right now, we don't have time to sit back and wait. We need to develop the words that accurately describe the dangers we are seeing. We can't let comfortable euphemisms and terminology cloud out the truths of our moment. To try to come up with new ways to describe our politics is not an easy undertaking, but it is a necessary one. If we hope to accurately diagnose what ails us and find solutions rooted in the current reality, we must let go of the definitions of the past. |
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