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You might have heard: A lawsuit filed in Delaware earlier this month claimed Alden Global Capital was siphoning millions of dollars from Digital First Media, and investing the money in “speculative ventures” (DFM Workers)
But did you know: In a court filing, Alden Global Capital discloses using millions of dollars from Digital First Media in its other investments (DFM Workers)
In court filings last week, Alden Global Capital denies many of the allegations made against it, but does disclose that it used cash from the Digital First Media newspaper chain for Alden-managed investments. Julie Reynolds writes, for a critical site run by the company’s labor union, that this was happening at the same time that thousands of workers were being laid off from DFM. In the filings, Alden says $10 million was invested in December 2014 in Alden Global CRE Opportunities Master Fund LP, which Reynolds says later invested $80 million in Homex, “a bankrupt developer charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with committing the biggest real estate fraud in Mexican history.” The filings also say DFM has invested $248.5 million of workers’ pension funds in Alden-controlled affiliates as of June 2016.
+ CJR profiles Julie Reynolds, a freelance reporter in the Monterey Bay area and a Center for Investigative Reporting alum who’s covering Alden and DFM for a site run by Guild-represented employees of DFM (CJR)
+ Noted: Facebook outlines steps to protect elections, including removing fake accounts, increasing transparency around ads and reducing the spread of false news (Facebook Newsroom); Facebook also starts allowing fact-checking partners to review photos and videos, and flag stories before being prompted (TechCrunch); Conservative publishers say Facebook’s algorithm change unfairly targeted their traffic, but traffic declines could be attributed to readers labeling the outlets as untrustworthy (Politico); The Dallas Morning News will feature more sponsored content “paid for by companies to focus on corporate social responsibility” (Dallas Morning News); WSJ employees say a senior editor tried to pull a story on economic recovery in the U.S. that was “not politically palatable” (Huffington Post)
The week in fact-checking
As part of our fact-checking journalism project, Jane Elizabeth and Poynter’s Alexios Mantzarlis and Daniel Funke highlight stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the Internet. This week’s round-up includes fact-checking that focuses on issues rather than statements, how to celebrate International Fact-Checking Day, and why “fake news” may get more sinister.
Lessons from 2 years of The Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab: Think about how your innovation projects fit into readers’ lives (Nieman Lab)
Two years after its launch, The Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab is winding down, and shared the lessons it learned at an event on Monday. The Mobile Innovation Lab was funded by a $2.6 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Here are some of the things they talked about on Monday: What does “innovation” mean in a newsroom on a practical level? What should the relationship between journalists and developers look like? And, what makes up an effective experiment?
+ A framework from El Tímpano for how to ask your community what information they want and need (Madeleine Bair, Medium)
Product-centric thinking may stave off innovation, rather than encourage it (BBC News Labs)
At BBC News Labs’s Media Innovation Unconference, organizers encouraged participants to think about the challenges facing legacy news outlets, and how innovators can optimize their processes to provide the most value to their newsrooms. Here, BBC News Labs shares three major takeaways from the event. One of those ideas is that product-centric thinking may actually be a barrier to innovation: “Because a good product is stripped of functionality that isn’t essential to achieving its end goal, elements that might be useful in future experiments are often shaved away early in the process. … Because you’ve eliminated that capability from the scope of the initial product, you’ve set back future experiments.”
Slack will soon be able to tell you whether you speak to men and women differently (Quartz)
After Quartz published a story late last year on how men and women use Slack differently, Slack has started to think about the gender dynamics in its product. One product it’s creating around this is analytics on how people interact with different demographics — for example, do you speak to women or people of color differently? “These are analytics that no one else has access to you except for you,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield explains. “And they don’t present you with any real moral value either way, but [they answer questions like], do you talk to men differently than you talk to women? Do you speak to support groups differently than you speak to superiors? Do you speak in public differently than you speak in private?”
Covering criticism of Google and Facebook is personal for journalists, because many blame the platforms for the industry’s problems (Axios)
“Outrage over Facebook’s misuse of user data and failure to rein in election fraud is real,” Scott Rosenberg writes. “But the zeal that media outlets bring to their Facebook coverage is personal, too. It’s turbocharged because journalists, individually and collectively, blame Facebook — along with other tech giants, like Google, and the internet itself — for seducing their readers, impoverishing their employers, and killing off their jobs. … Media companies stand to gain now from a public and regulatory backlash against social media that knocks Facebook and Google down a peg or two.”
+ “[Facebook tries] to use as much free material as possible to get people to stay on their platform,” Kara Swisher says. “They don’t care what does that. They pretend to care. They give speeches, and go to media organizations and sell that vision.” (Digiday)
Chrome’s mobile article recommendations are turning into a major traffic driver for publishers — but publishers don’t know why their articles get chosen (Nieman Lab)
Article recommendations in Chrome’s mobile browser are emerging as a major referral source for publishers, data from Chartbeat suggests. Chartbeat’s data shows that the recommendations are one of the fastest growing sources of publisher traffic on the Internet: “Articles for You” grew 2,100 percent in 2017, going from 15 million visits per month to 341 million visits per month. But publishers are unsure why their stories do or do not get chosen as recommendations: There’s a preference for AMP stories, but Google has revealed little info on how a user’s browsing habits and other factors play into the recommendations.
+ Is journalism a form of activism? Danielle Tcholakian takes a look at the definition of “activism,” and how journalism fits into that: “If you’re a female journalist and you’re reporting on Roe v. Wade or abortion access, that is something that affects you personally. You don’t have ‘the view from nowhere.’ The privilege of the view from nowhere was set up by white men,” CJR’s Karen Ho says. “[But] if I’m going to make an argument, I’m always going to back it up with studies.” (Longreads)
+ “People like me generally do not make it that far in journalism, because it’s not very well-paid, generally speaking, and it’s not something we always have access to; it almost seems like a luxury to be able to write and tell stories for a living,” says Tanzina Vega, the new host of WNYC’s The Takeaway. “I think we as newsrooms have to examine who we’re hiring, why we’re hiring, why we’re not opening the doors to people who don’t go to Ivy League schools as much as we are to people who do.” (CJR)
+ Trump seems obsessed with crushing Amazon — but Jonathan Chait argues that this obsession is more about wanting to crush The Washington Post (Daily Intelligencer)
+ Attacks against the Parkland high school students from the right show how intense media polarization is becoming, Margaret Sullivan writes (Washington Post)
The post Need to Know: March 30, 2018 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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