An engine of nuance
Media statistic of the week?
According to a new study by researchers from NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, polite warnings are surprisingly good at reducing hate speech on social media. The authors of the study, published by Cambridge University Press, concluded, “Our results show that only one warning tweet sent by an account with no more than 100 followers can decrease the ratio of tweets with hateful language by up to 10%.”?
Not only that, as Brianna Provenzano writes at Gizmodo, the “more politely phrased” the warning tweets were, the more headway the researchers made with users, as those messages resulted in a decrease in hate speech of up to 20%.
This past week in the media industry?
Crossed the line
Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Surge” series was the final straw for Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, who announced that they’ve resigned as Fox News contributors.?
They wrote about Why We Are Leaving Fox News in a brief piece for The Dispatch, the online publication they founded in 2019. In it, they describe the Carlson series as “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.” They add that the network’s opinion hosts are not only amplifying false claims and bizarre narratives but also contradicting the work of the news division of Fox News itself.
Ben Smith of The New York Times spoke with Hayes and Goldberg about their decision for his latest Media Equation column, Tucker Carlson’s ‘Patriot Purge’ Special Leads Two Fox News Contributors to Quit. Smith says it’s “the end of a lingering hope among some at Fox News — strange as this is for outsiders to understand — that the channel would at some point return to a pre-Trump reality that was also often hyperpartisan, but that kept some distance from Republican officials.”
“When the author of ‘Liberal Fascism’ and the chief proponent of an al Qaeda-Saddam link think you’ve gone off the deep end, that’s saying something,” tweets Zack Beauchamp.
David Folkenflik of NPR also interviewed Hayes and Goldberg separately for his story, Two Fox News commentators resign over Tucker Carlson’s series on the Jan. 6 siege.?
“Two Fox News commentators tell me why they resigned over Tucker Carlson’s series on Jan. 6 siege. Top Fox anchors warn their CEO that Carlson crossed a line. Given strong pro-Trump ratings, why would anything change?” he tweets.?
Not everyone’s complaining, though. Eoin Higgins noticed that Glenn Greenwald’s tweets have become a lot more positive toward Fox News since April 2020, which also happens to be when he became a regular guest on the network. Check out Higgins’ analysis and charts in his The Flashpoint newsletter story, Company Man: The Data Behind Glenn Greenwald's Twitter Loyalty to Fox News.
The case for shoe-leather reporting
Conor Friedersdorf has a new piece in The Atlantic exploring What the Pope Knows About Journalists’ Soles, and no, that’s not a typo.?
“Pope Francis is right: journalists need to do more to escape being too online,” Friedersdorf tweets. “In my estimation, in person is especially underrated in opinion journalism. But lots of compelling forces are pushing in the opposite direction.”
“A really excellent and timely piece here,” says Drew Holden. “Great piece,” tweets Stephen J. Bronner. “Anyone who does any reporting (I used to be a local reporter) needs to talk to people face to face. Not only do you get better information that way, but you see people as, well, people.”
Friedersdorf points out, “Today, if a few thousand people are reading your posts or tweets, you have a readership comparable to that of a small-town newspaper columnist. Are you taking the same care with your claims that you’d expect of that journalist?”
Christopher Maag goes so far as to say, “This is the most important essay on journalism you’ll read this year. Done right - which means done in person - journalism is not a weapon of ideology. It’s an engine of nuance.”
About managerial dysfunction
Marc Tracy of The New York Times has the latest on troubles at one of the largest newsrooms covering New York City. Gothamist, the news site of the New York public radio station WNYC, deleted four articles in the last week of October, replacing each one with an editor’s note.
Tracy writes that he retracted articles “used language from Wikipedia entries and articles in Salon and The New York Times without credit.”? The author of the articles, Jami Floyd, was reassigned.
“Of all the potential sins in journalism, why is anyone bothering to get mad about someone copying a sentence from Wikipedia?” Joshua Benton wonders.?
Jim O’Grady says, “I don’t know all the facts of the case in the main part of this story. But I stand by my statement about managerial dysfunction in the WNYC newsroom. It’s bad. No one I know who remains there is ‘psyched’ about Audrey Cooper’s reign of retribution.”
Of the details in Tracy’s reporting, Nick Pinto says, “This makes things sound pretty bleak over at WNYC and Gothamist. Solidarity with all the people trying to do good work over there under these frustrating conditions.”
Media biz headlines
Press Gazette’s Andrew Kersley reports that the Sifted, the FT-backed site for start-ups, has raised ￡4m of investment funding for a 25% stake. “￡4m investment for 25% stake in @Siftedeu gives the FT-backed news site for start-ups a potential valuation of ￡16m just two years after launch. Good work @johnthornhillft and co!” tweets Dominic Ponsford.
Mark Stenberg of Adweek has details on the latest expansion news from Axios, ‘100 is the Minimum’—Axios Local Expands to 11 New Cities. Axios says the newsletter program is on pace to net $5 million in revenue by the end of 2021. Mike Orren, Chief Product Officer of The Dallas Morning News, shared, “This announcement of Axios Local expansion sent me to @dallasnews’ analytics this morn. The Dallas edition links to us more or less every day. Since their Sept 19 launch we’ve gotten 546 visits from their readers, about a quarter of those on launch day.”
Next up, Anna Nicolaou tweets, “New @theinformation has reached 225,000 users (paid subscribers + newsletter readers) over the summer @Jessicalessin was considering starting a new publication about Hollywood. Instead, she’s launched a weekend lifestyle edition. details here.” Check out her story at the Financial Times, Growth of The Information is good news for media business.
Meanwhile, “The Athletic has found the limits of the paywall.” Gerry Smith links to his story with Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg News on The Athletic’s struggles: The Athletic Searches Far and Wide for New Subscribers as It Seeks a Sale. Shaw shares, “The Athletic raised almost $140 million as a subscription-only publication. But as it tries to sell itself, CEO @amather tells @gerryfsmith and me it now needs to sell ads too.”
And this is definitely not good news, via Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab, The vulture is hungry again: Alden Global Capital wants to buy a few hundred more newspapers. This time it’s Lee Enterprises in the cross-hairs. Adding it to its empire would leave two American local newspaper giants—Gannett and Alden—and everyone else far behind, he writes.
A slew of Facebook stories
First up, it’s “Facebook still trying to lie about how popular right wing content is on their platform and the role they played in making it so,” tweets Daniel Harvey.
领英推荐
While Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform, by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns. As Corin Faife explains, data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows Facebook Isn’t Telling You How Popular Right-Wing Content Is on the Platform.?
In fact, outlets like The Daily Wire and The Western Journal were among the top-viewed domains in the Citizen Browser sample.
“‘They are very good at dancing with data.’ - Facebook whistleblower. We’ve discussed this regarding Zuckerberg’s misleading testimony on hate speech. But this Markup report is super important to understand prevalence of news brands,” tweets Jason Kint, who has more in a Twitter thread here.?
Speaking of hate speech on the platform, years after coming under scrutiny for contributing to ethnic and religious violence in Myanmar, Facebook still has problems detecting and moderating hate speech and misinformation on its platform in the Southeast Asian nation. Internal documents reviewed by Sam McNeil and Victoria Milko of The Associated Press show hate speech in Myanmar continues to thrive on Facebook.?
Another one
And then there’s the new reporting from Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Craig Timberg of The Washington Post, Facebook’s race-blind policies around hate speech came at the expense of Black users, new documents show. Or as Molly Jong-Fast puts it, “Another story about how Facebook is a cesspool.”
Sources told The Post that “Far from protecting Black and other minority users, Facebook executives wound up instituting half-measures after the ‘worst of the worst’ project that left minorities more likely to encounter derogatory and racist language on the site.”
Ryan Mac says, “This story has a lot, but the biggest takeaway has to be that Facebook lied to an independent investigator that sought to do a civil rights audit. I’m not sure anything surprises me about FB any more, but this shows the limits of self regulation.”
Also, “This is your periodic reminder that you should #DeleteFacebook,” tweets Aaron Hockley.
The full papers will be public
Meanwhile, on Monday Gizmodo announced its plans to make the entire Facebook papers leak public, in partnership with a small group of independent monitors who will be helping establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication.?
Dell Cameron, Andrew Couts and Shoshana Wodinsky of Gizmodo explain: We’re Making the Facebook Papers Public. Here’s Why and How.
“We’re publishing the Facebook Papers,” tweets Cameron. “For privacy’s sake & to ensure we aren’t teaching extremists and spies how to game the measures that help detect harassment & propaganda, we created a security & ethics advisory board & will work with local experts.”
As Wodinsky says, “so........ our fb papers project is getting expanded a bit. and by ‘a bit’ i mean ‘it’s now inarguably the biggest project of my entire reporting career’ i can’t believe we’re actually pulling this off.” Expect the first release to consist mostly of documents that warrant the least amount of inspection.?
Why you should care
Next, Mat Honan links to a “Great, scoopy story from @_KarenHao laying out how Facebook and Google effectively fund misinformation by paying millions of ad dollars to clickbait farms all around the world, often hosted on their own platforms.”?
In that piece, Karen Hao of MIT Technology Review reveals How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation. Her investigation found that the tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
“This new piece from @_KarenHao shows why you should care about the spammy crap filling up your Facebook feed and the feeds of users in countries Facebook doesn’t care about. Seems harmless? It’s absolutely not,” tweets Brandy Zadrozny.
Must-reads
For her Heated newsletter, Emily Atkin reveals How Exxon duped “The Daily.” She digs into how the popular New York Times podcast aired a misleading climate ad during COP26, despite having policies designed to prevent misinformation.
Bill McKibben is impressed with the “Fascinating detective work from @emorwee, with a smart point from @DoctorVive: one way to figure out disinformation is by its effect.”
Atkin explains that the ad used a common climate misinformation technique called paltering: “No individual sentence was 100 percent false, but together they created a misleading impression of the company and its climate efforts,” she writes.
The latest Exit Interview from OpenNews Source is with Moiz Syed, formerly of The Intercept and ProPublica, who talked about “the magic of being in dialogue with the world, the bargains we make to do this work, a ‘journalism-awards-industrial complex’ that competes for resources, and ‘objectivity’ that competes with moral clarity.”
“‘Abolish ICE’ should be an easy moral call to make—but, bound by the straightjacket of objectivity, newsroom managers don’t want to put themselves on either side of such an issue,” Alleen Brown quotes, from “The great @moizsyed keepin it real as usual.”
Next, Carol Leonnig says, “???If you care about reporters digging deep to find the truth others want hidden, this is an interesting group to watch. I’m sharing a story from a favorite former colleague, @jimmorrill who took a look at this accountability journalist team in Asheville.”?
That’s Jim Morrill’s story for The Assembly about The Asheville Watchdog, On Guard in Asheville. As Morrill says, “The Asheville Watchdog is not your typical news startup. Not with its volunteer staff of accomplished journalists who haven’t quite gotten the hang of retirement.”
And last up, pie.?
Just in time for Thanksgiving here in the U.S., Meet the Man Baking Free Pies for Laid-Off Journalists. Rachel Sugar of Grub Street talked with Nick Robins-Early, a HuffPo casualty himself, about his new venture, Layoff Pies. Travis Waldron says, “This is the most @nickrobinsearly thing, by which I mean it’s absolutely lovely.”
A few more
From the Muck Rack Team
With hundreds of emails hitting a writer’s inbox every day, how do you ensure that your pitch stands out—and gets opened? Muck Rack collaborated on this year’s Pitching Data Dive report with PR coach Michael Smart, who brings decades of experience training PR pros to land great coverage. Head over to the blog to download the report and read about some key takeaways, including 7 subject line best practices from top-performing PR pitches.