Tosten Burks – GOOD – How reporters around the world risk their lives for the truth : Why The Media Isn’t The ‘Enemy’
SO IT’S LIKE SLEEPING WITH UNIT 180, THEN: Single mosquito bite might be enough to transmit multiple viruses, study finds
"Despite the seeming ubiquity of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan do not report regularly visiting social media sites. But majorities in all of the 14 countries surveyed say they at least use the internet. Social media use is relatively common among people in Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia and the U.S.
ANALYSIS: Vlado as Triple agent or just best ever KGB player Putin calls flap over Trump’s meeting with Russian diplomats ‘political schizophrenia’
The Kremlin has ridiculed the flap in the U.S. over allegations of possible collusion between members of Trump’s campaign during his run for the White House and the president’s seemingly cozy relations with Putin. Moscow has denied meddling in U.S. elections and political affairs.Putin warned that the United States’ anti-Russian rhetoric could backfire.“You know what surprises me? They are destabilizing the internal political situation in the United States under anti-Russian slogans,” Putin said, according to Tass. “They either do not understand that they are harming their own country, which means they are just shortsighted, or they understand everything, and that means that they are dangerous and unscrupulous people.”
The Importance of Truth Workers in an Era of Factual Recession, Alison Head and John Wihbey: “In our post-truth world, the evaluation of knowledge has become a perfunctory process facilitated by the ease of the one-search interface. Many of us, not only students,
have become a nation of Google searchers looking for instantaneous matches of facts and figures rather than thoroughly interrogating the veracity of the information we find online, and reflecting on how it informs our thoughts, beliefs, and opinions…”
Last month, The Intercept published “Trial and Terror,” a database of – and series of stories about – the 796 people prosecuted for international terrorism by the United States since the attacks of September 11, 2001. To accompany the database, Moiz Syed, a data journalist
and designer at The Intercept, developed a visualization to convey details of the cases, including the most common charges, terrorist affiliation and prosecution location, as well as individual profiles of the defendants. Storybench spoke with Syed about the tools he used to analyze the data, his news organization’s approach to mobile design, and the importance of sharing this kind of data resource…”
“James Daunt, chief executive of Waterstones, contends that the resurgence of the physical book is real and sustainable. Furthermore, a focus on the book as object of desire has been central to his turnaround of Waterstones. This has not only seen the firm return to profit, but has made the shops, once dim grey halls of cheap paperbacks, ziggurats of three for twos and mountains of celebrity cookbooks, things of beauty in themselves, as cleverly curated and carefully atmospheric as Daunt’s eponymous London bookshops. “A very large part of the way I sell books has been about how you present them, how you bring the customer to them and exploit the tactile sense of a physical book. We’ve changed the furniture at Waterstones to make that happen. We have smaller tables with more focused displays. Everything is aimed at persuading people to pick things up, trying to catch their eye, making bookshops a place where you discover beautiful things.”
SALENA ZITO: The crisis in American journalism benefits no one.
Beginning in the 1980s, Washington and New York City newsrooms began to be dominated by people who had the same backgrounds; for the most part they went to the same Ivy League journalism schools, where they made the right contacts and connections to get their jobs.Yes, elite networks are a thing not just in law schools, as “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance so aptly described of his experiences in law school. They also exist in Ivy League or elite journalism schools.And the journalists who came from working-class roots found it in their best interest to adopt the conventional, left-of-center views that were filling the halls of newsrooms.In short, after a while you adopt the culture you exist in either out of survival or acceptance or a little of both. Or you really just wanted to shed your working-class roots for a variety of reasons: shame, aspiration, ascension, etc.That does not make them bad people – aspiration is the heart of the American Dream — but it did begin the decline of connection between elite journalism institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and the rest of the country.So when fewer and fewer reporters shared the same values and habits of many of their consumers, inferences in their stories about people of faith and their struggles squaring gay marriage or abortion with their belief systems were picked up by the readers.Pro-tip, don’t think people can’t pick up an inference, even the most subtle, in the written word. It is as evident as a news anchor rolling his eyes at someone on his panel he doesn’t agree with.Same goes for job losses, particularly in coal mines or manufacturing. News reports filled with how those job losses help the environment are not going to sit well with the person losing their job. Also: Just because they have a job that faces an environmental challenge does not mean they hate the environment.For 20 years these news organizations, along with CBS, NBC and ABC, were the only game in town. They served as gatekeepers of information, and as their newsrooms became more and more detached from the center of the country, consumers began to become detached from them.And then along came the Internet. Not only were different sources now available, but news aggregators such as Drudge made it easy to find things giving everyone access to “alternative facts.”The universe of information expanded, and it became clear that what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or the New York Times told consumers was not the whole story, and if you were a conservative (and a plurality of Americans self-identify as center right) you lost all trust in the mainstream media.