Category Archives: News & Media

Dan Gillmor, The Atlantic, Aug 22 2014 Twitter and YouTube are among a tiny group of giant companies with greater and greater power—and less and less accountability—over what we read, hear, and watch online. Who gave them this power? We did. And if we don’t take back what we’ve given away—and what’s being taken away—we’ll […]

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, Jun 17 2014 Ask readers what they want, and they’ll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they’ll mostly eat candy. This year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism asked thousands of people around the world what sort of news was most important to them. The graph below shows […]

Mark Berman, The Washington Post, June 2 2014 The Supreme Court declined to step in Monday on behalf of James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author who faces potential jail time for not identifying a source. Risen is the author of the 2006 book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA […]

@stefanwehrmeyer, @annabelchurch and @pudo, Ghostery, May 2014 Sites like Facebook and Twitter are often criticised in the media for their data-based business models. Ironically, they share user behaviour with far fewer shady ad networks than the average news site. Visiting Facebook will only request data from Facebook’s own servers, while a visit to Die Welt […]

Lance Ulanoff, Mashable, May 14, 2014 A top European Union court ruled on Tuesday that consumers can ask Google to remove potentially damaging content about them, also known as the preposterously-named “right to be forgotten.” One problem: It’s exactly opposite of the way the Internet should work. The EU’s action is such a fundamental misunderstanding […]

Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, May 8, 2014 What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them? According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. Nearly one-third […]

Will Oremus, Slate, March 17, 2014 It’s reasonable to expect that robo-journalism will improve over time as companies like Narrative Science refine their algorithms. And it’s remarkable that we’ve already reached a point where LAT readers can expect to encounter the phrase, “This post was written by an algorithm.” Just don’t expect the Quakebots of […]

Tony Haile, Time, March 9, 2014 If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native […]

Felix Salmon, Reuters, February 11, 2014 For centuries, news has been based on a broadcasting paradigm: a small group of journalists creates a product — a self-contained news bundle — which is then consumed by a very large group of viewers or readers or listeners. Various different bundles competed for your attention: you might get […]

Sam Frizell, Time Magazine, January 27, 2014 With its 230 million regular users, Twitter has become such a broad stream of personal expression that researchers are beginning to use it as a tool to dig into public health problems. Believe it or not, a scientist out there might actually care about the sandwich you ate […]