From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last night that content from family and friends will be given priority over published news is one more bad episode in a vexed on-again, off-again relationship between the platform giant and serious journalism.
Over the next few months, with the implementation of a revised strategy, Facebook’s two billion users will see less content produced by news organizations and more from their friends, if all goes according to the company’s plan. So what does that mean for the media companies that have come to depend on the social media giant to drive readers to the articles and videos they create?
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
Two things can be true at the same time. Journalists screw up — often. And we have a responsibility to do better. At the same time, quality journalism is geared towards reaching the truth. We cross-check sources. We fact-check claims. We correct our mistakes, as the vast collection of examples below shows. Few other professions are as wedded to corrections as ours is. As a former fact-checker, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a politician publicly corrected a false claim.
Nine European press agencies published an op-ed arguing that Google and Facebook should be required to pay royalties for third-party news they profit from.
Nine European press agencies on Wednesday published an op-ed in Le Monde arguing that Google and Facebook should be required to pay copyright royalties on the third-party news and information they distribute and profit from. The article was published as the European Parliament is debating new legislation that would, according to Agence France-Presse, “make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to.” The arguments laid out in the statement should have photojournalists, editorial photographers and anyone who cares about the fate of media organizations in the digital age, nodding in unison.
Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
Welcome to WikiTribune, a pilot project for a new approach to journalism where the community is at the center. This is not a news service – yet. It’ll only be the news service I envisage when you play a full role.
The nearly century-old company must turn to its new owner to chart a path for its future — one perhaps not built on the iconic photography and longform journalism that helped it become a household name.
On a recent episode of the Longform podcast, the hosts heaped praised on Jodi Kantor and her reporting for the bombshell Harvey Weinstein exposé. The episode was released the same day the New York Times published a story reported by Kantor, Melena Ryzik, and Cara Buckley in which five women accuse comedian Louis C.K. of sexual harassment and assault, a story that had existed in a similar whisper network among female performers for years.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
Platforms rely on these algorithms to perform actions at scale, but algorithms at scale also become increasingly inscrutable, even to the people who wrote the code. In her recent TED Talk about the complexity of AI, Zeynep Tufekci points out that not even the people behind Facebook’s algorithms truly understand them:
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer up memes designed to feel real, if only for an instant — long enough for our minds to make a false connection.
In the coming weeks, executives from Facebook and Twitter will appear before Congressional committees to answer questions about the use of their platforms by Russian hackers and others to spread misinformation and skew elections. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook sold more than $100,000 worth of ads to a Kremlin-linked company, and Google sold more than $4,500 worth to accounts thought to be connected to the Russian government.
Mic’s website audience is tanking by millions of readers a month—and if it continues, it just may save online journalism. That’s because Mic is another example of the cautionary tale set by publications that pivot to video. The strategy, which came int
Hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs while shiny-object-chasing publishers are no closer to creating cohesive video strategies to replace the traffic those writers were producing. Publishers who pivoted to video have forfeited the majority of their hard-won native audiences in only a year of churning out undifferentiated, bland chunks of largely aggregated “snackable” video. That’s no one’s idea of success
I never get used to it: the layoffs and buyouts, the shrinking of newsrooms, the doing of more and more with less and less. You’d think, as someone who’s covered the media for nearly four years, that I would have by now.
Whether social-media users actually want to watch the kinds of videos that Facebook rewards is beside the point. “What these people are talking about isn’t even actual traditional worthwhile video,” Silvia Killingsworth at The Awl writes, without any mercy at whatsoever. “It’s a box with a play button on it just begging you for a click. It’s a glorified powerpoint presentation—slides, essentially, with words and pictures that flash and Ken Burns around the screen, sometimes with a shaded overlay.”
For 27 years, Mexican newspaper Norte de Ciudad Juarez employed over 125 journalists and a team of a dozen photographers to cover life in the border city of Juarez.
Though the 140-character network favored by President Trump is far smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
By now, it’s a common refrain: Facebook insists that it’s not a media company, even though it does exactly what most news organizations do: Show its users advertising that’s adjacent to content relevant to their interests.
The influence of social media platforms and technology companies is having a greater effect on American journalism than even the shift from print to digital. There is a rapid takeover of traditional publishers’ roles by companies including Facebook, Sn
The influence of social media platforms and technology companies is having a greater effect on American journalism than even the shift from print to digital
