Covid-19 accelerated the media’s reporting on early, drafty scientific research (for better and for worse)
Since the first reported case of Covid-19, cities across the world have shut down, people have stopped socializing and going to work, economies have taken a hit and there have been far too many deaths. But at the same...
Most U.S. news organizations still won’t let most readers cancel their subscriptions online
Bad news for people who hate using the phone: Just 41% of U.S. news publishers “make it easy” for subscribers to cancel their subscriptions online, according to a new survey from the American Press Institute. News organizations also vary widely in how and whether they identify or assist subscribers who are at risk of canceling. The blunt, “we’ll-just-make-it-hard-for-you-to-cancel” method remains more common. Jeff Sonderman...
Twitter’s new “Super Follow” will let you charge for tweets, and journalists are drooling
Can you imagine how great it would be if you got to pay for all of Nieman Lab’s tweets? A feature that Twitter is working on could make that dream a reality: The company said at an analyst event Thursday that it’s...
“‘That’s not Timesean’ can be used to exclude”: The New York Times gives the big report treatment to enacting “sweeping” cultural change
In 2014, The New York Times produced its pivotal Innovation Report. The report, which was the product of six months of work by Times staffers and was meant to be an internal document before it was leaked, outlined the...
The dark side of translation: The Epoch Times is now spreading disinformation through new brands
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed. The...
Some Facebook users will “temporarily” see less political content in their feeds. (They already didn’t see much.)
Facebook is taking small steps toward reducing the amount of political news that some users in some countries see in their News Feeds, the company announced this week in a blog post: Over the next few months, we’ll...
After the Capitol riots, platforms, archivists, conspiracists, and investigators collide
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This regular roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed. Some of...
The Correspondent, De Correspondent’s English-language site, is shutting down on Dec. 31
After a splashy $2.6 million crowdfunding campaign (one that cost $1.8 million to run) to launch a New York–based site — which, it gradually became clear, would actually just be an English-language site based in The...
Facebook will spend less time policing “Men are trash” content, more time taking down “Worst of the Worst”
“Alarmingly, students’ approach was consistent with guidelines.” Commonly accepted media literacy techniques “make students susceptible to scammers, rogues, bad actors, and hate mongers,” Sam Wineburg, Joel...
How much political news do people see on Facebook? I went inside 173 people’s feeds to find out
What do people see in their Facebook feeds? How much news do they encounter there — from legitimate outlets or from those known for sowing misinformation? Are most people’s accounts cesspools of fake news and...
Older people and Republicans are most likely to share Covid-19 stories from fake news sites on Twitter
Since March, a group of scholars from Northeastern, Harvard, Rutgers, and Northwestern have been working to understand how social behaviors affect transmission of Covid-19. They’ve issued a series of reports over the...
New York Magazine brings the 16-year-old Curbed back to life (but says goodbye to its local sites)
When Vox Media bought New York Magazine in September 2019, it was unclear what would become of Curbed, the network of urban design and real estate sites that Vox had acquired in 2013. (Curbed is now pretty much a senior...