Mark Zuckerberg is displeased. It’s been more than four months since election night, but Facebook still finds itself in the hot seat over the spread of fake news on the platform, and what role (if any) it played in the election.
He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.
There is a sense that everyone with a Press badge is a target, someone who is obviously unfriendly to the candidate (to the -elect…) and yet there seems to be no comprehension that before there was a 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, there was a 1st Amendment.
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.
What was truly significant in media this year? Was it a development in journalism, or corporate moves, technological advances, social media or something else? What insight might we place into a personal time capsule? Here we go:
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.
My main journalistic lesson of 2016 is to brace for massive upheaval and redefinition. What we’ve just seen — the election, fake news, red feeds, blue feeds, mistrust, niche sites, the so-called end of the mainstream — have implications for all of us in the fourth estate.
We must face the fact that Facebook doesn’t care about news in the journalism sense. News represents about 10% of the average user newsfeed and news can be cut overnight if circumstances dictate with no significant impact for the platform.
What is truly horrifying is that fake news is not the manipulation of an unsuspecting public. Quite the opposite. It is willful belief by the public. In effect, the American people are accessories in their own disinformation campaign.
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.
The Facebook ad juggernaut may next be poaching from local TV ad budgets as it builds out video audience. And Facebook remains a formidable competitor to magazines and any digital startup, profit or nonprofit, for whom digital ads are an important revenue source.
How a misinformed Twitter post the night after the presidential election fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory and became a talking point — even as it was being proved false.
The New York Times deconstructs how Mr. Tucker’s now-deleted declaration on Twitter the night after the election turned into a fake-news phenomenon. It is an example of how, in an ever-connected world where speed often takes precedence over truth, an observation by a private citizen can quickly become a talking point for a world leader, even as it is being proved false
Fake news should be shunned, but the discussion of it misunderstands a new media world in which every story is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
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.
James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist at The Times, discuss the good and bad of election coverage.
This has not been your typical presidential election — not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.
All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.
Plunging print ad sales and an explosion of online outlets spreading inaccurate information threaten to diminish, and in some cases extinguish, the impact of traditional media companies.
The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.
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.
Evidence of Facebook’s fake news problem is piling up: The “Trending” section keeps getting hoaxed. Hyperpartisan pages spew fake posts that go viral. And traditional media are picking up those fakes as true.
“IF ANY OF these law enforcement shoot one of my people, it is going down, people,” Atsa E’sha Hoferer tells the camera on Facebook Live. “We are prayerful people.”
The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.
The story of more than a decade of war, terror and revolution in the Middle East, seen through the eyes of six people whose lives were changed forever.
Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja.
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.
Not long after Jake Silverstein was named editor of The New York Times Magazine in 2014, he had a dinnertime conversation with writer Scott Anderson and photographer Paolo Pellegrin, two longtime contributors to the magazine.
The subject? “A big, epic project,” timed to the fifth anniversary of the Arab Spring, that would take over the entirety of the magazine
The Philando Castile shooting and its aftermath have catapulted services like Facebook Live and Periscope into the center of the news, challenging cable to adapt.
But as they say on cable, we’ve just gotten word of some breaking news — and it’s not pretty. If you’re watching on mute (which says something by itself, right?), you can consult this helpful Chyron: “Facebook to Swallow TV News, Just as It Has Everything Else.”
