Thursday, April 18, 2019

Lifting Journalism by Knowing What Readers Are Looking For

Behold the unbearable tedium of lyric poetry: oversensitive souls wandering the  world, logging every detail, however  inane  
Former Peru president Alan Garcia takes own life as police close in - NEWS.com.au 

Australian who claims to have invented bitcoin finds himself in a crypto firestorm

The world of cryptocurrencies is in a tizzy, and Craig Wright is at the centre of it again.

How much of SV do you and your faction own? How much has this cost you?
CW: This has never been about making money –- if it was I could've cashed out long ago and sailed into the sunset, literally.
We 

The police involved in the arrest came under scrutiny earlier this year after investigators accused 54-year-old Goines of lying on the search warrant affidavit used to justify a no-knock raid at 7815 Harding Street. When officers burst in the home that evening in search of a heroin dealer, they kicked off a gun battle that left dead Dennis Tuttle, his wife Rhogena Nicholas, and a pit bull they’d been dog-sitting.

The Greatest Art Forger Of All Time Might Have Been Killed By The Mafia


When Eric Hebborn was found with a fractured skull near his home in Rome in 1996, his death was a mystery. But now, filmmakers making an 8-part miniseries about his life (and the more than 1,000 forgeries he claimed to have passed off as real) say they have evidence that not only was he working for the mafia for years, but they may have had him murdered as well. – The Guardian (UK)



Young Liberal Instagram 'rich kid' questioned by police after altercation


Former Liberal club vice-president Benedict Kusay said to have pushed a female security guard after he was barred from entering by factional opponents.






'It's a witch hunt': John Barilaro defends Nat linked to scandal


Nationals ministers and MPs have raised concerns over the appointment of Jeff McCormack as chief of staff to Water Minister Melinda Pavey.





Commonwealth Orange Book 2019: policy priorities for the federal government


John Daley, Stephen Duckett,Peter Goss, Andrew Norton,Marion Terrill, Danielle Wood,Tony Wood, Brendan Coates
GRATTAN INSTITUTE
This report rates Australia’s performance against similar countries and proposes policy reforms for schools and universities, hospitals and housing, roads and railways, cities and regions, budgets and taxes, retirement incomes, and climate change.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: There was spying and much, much more. “Yesterday, an exchange between Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and AG William Barr during a Senate Appropriations hearing tore the space-time continuum for the institutional left. What appeared to careful observers of the Trump-RUSSIA collusion fable as a simple statement of fact, was an earth-shattering, scandalous, shocking blasphemy to those invested and implicated in the greatest political scandal in American history.”

To Purge Some of Social Media’s Ugliness, an Unlikely Lesson From Wall St. - The New York Times Deal Book – A simple rule that bolsters the banking system – “know your customer” — could help combat fake news and hate speech online if companies like Facebook and Twitter embraced it. “…The concept is “know your customer” — or KYC, as it’s called on Wall Street — and it’s straightforward: Given concerns about privacy, security and fraud when it comes to money, no bank is allowed to take on a new customer without verifying its existence and vetting its background. The idea of applying such a rule to social media has been floated before, but it has so far failed to take hold. Now may be the right time. Consider this: Facebook has said it shut down over 1.5 billion fake accounts from April through September last year (yes, that’s a “B” in billion). That was up from the 1.3 billion such accounts it eliminated in the six previous months. To put those numbers in context, Facebook has a reported user base of 2.3 billion. What if social media companies had to verify their users the same way banks do? You’d probably feel more confident that you were interacting with real people and were not just a target for malicious bots…”

 Lifting Journalism by Knowing What Readers Are Looking For - The New York Times: “Claudio E. Cabrera, who specializes in search engine optimization, describes how he keeps track of what’s hot in search and how that informs coverage — and what the limits are…How do you keep track of search trends? A lot of it really starts with taking a dive into the journalism your website is producing. I’m big on looking at our Times Wire tool when I wake up and the stories we’ve published overnight. I pick and choose what to read based on headlines and jot down anything that stands out. There are always stories within the story, and when we may not catch that story ourselves, another brand will and aggregate it, and it then becomes a trend. That becomes a missed opportunity for us. On a tools front, I use Google Trends, Kaleida, NewsWhip, Reddit and CrowdTangle. I like these tools because they incorporate search, social and the conversations around them…”

 Poynter: “As the Pulitzer Prize Board prepares to select its slate of 2019 winners to announce next week, likely little time will be spent reacting to presidential tweets — such as the March 29 one that urged the board to invalidate last year’s National Reporting prizes to the Washington Post and New York Times. “There was so much extraordinary work submitted” this year, Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy told Poynter in an email, “even in a year when journalism is yet again under relentless assault, including from the highest office in the land, and when the security threats remain high for journalists simply seeking to do their jobs.” Naming new winners is the 18-member Board’s main job now, of course. And the result of its secret deliberations to honor the best work in 14 journalism categories, and seven for arts, letters and music, will be livestreamed from Columbia University by Canedy next Monday, April 15 at 3 p.m. Eastern time. Typically, one winner and two finalists are announced in each category, based on the recommendations of jury panels…Among the work mentioned: The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi coverage as a Public Service contender, and The Wall Street Journal’s stories on “Trump’s Hush Money” and ProPublica’s coverage of immigration, both for National Reporting.)..”
Posted by at