While the automotive and technology worlds have been pouring billions into autonomous vehicles (AVs) and preparing to bring them to market soon as shared robo-taxis, Apple has mostly sat on the sidelines. Of course, Apple is the last company to ever make its intentions known, and the super-secret tech cult giant hasn't been totally out of the AV game based on the clues that have slipped out of its Cupertino, Calif., citadel over the past few years. News first broke in 2015 that it had assembled
Twitter says news organizations can apply to be exempt from updates to its political and issue advertising policy, reports Sara Fischer. News outlets had protested Facebook’s issue ads policy for months after Facebook said it would put their ads in the same archive as political ads, in an attempt to provide transparency on ads bought by hyper-partisan sites to promote misleading news. Facebook eventually tweaked its policy, but some news organizations were so mad they vowed to suspend their paid promotion on Facebook. Twitter, which has been focusing on publisher relations, is trying to avoid that with its new policy. Criteria for exemption include having a searchable archive available online, contact information available online, and a minimum of 200,000 monthly unique visitors in the U.S. Enforcement of the new issue ads policy will begin Sept. 30, 2018, giving publishers and advertisers a month to apply for exemptions.
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As part of a fact-checking journalism partnership, API and the Poynter Institute highlight stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the Internet. In the latest edition of “The Week in Fact-Checking” newsletter, how Full Fact has helped fact-checkers live fact-check political events; now Pinterest is a hotbed of conspiracy theories; and a new social media platform for American liberals that is filled with false rumors about Donald Trump.
What can you do if your station’s news report is used in an incomplete or misleading way by a political organization or candidate with an agenda? Unfortunately, the answer may be “not much.” Although some stations or networks will challenge campaigns for using their footage without permission, courts have generally come down on the side of campaigns, considering the material to be “fair use.” However, newsrooms should do everything they can to be as transparent as possible over the issue, and “use it as an opportunity to inform the audience about how and why this tactic is used, to serve up the entire story rather than the small segments used in the campaign ad, and to pledge fairness in the weeks ahead leading up to the election,” says Tim Wieland, news director at KCNC-TV. “Addressing the issue is a must,” agrees Lynn Walsh of Trusting News. “It’s important to explain what’s happening, why this is legal … and that it doesn’t have anything to do with you agreeing, promoting or helping the candidate [or] issue.”
BuzzFeed News and its partners published an exclusive report that details how the Russian government discreetly funded a group of seemingly independent news websites in Eastern Europe to pump out stories dictated to them by the Kremlin. Long before Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election became one of the biggest stories in the world, and Kremlin disinformation campaigns became a household issue, Moscow faced accusations of trying to influence public opinion in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are all members of NATO. The revelations about the websites in the Baltic states provide a rare and detailed inside look into how such disinformation campaigns work, and the lengths to which Moscow is willing to go to obscure its involvement in such schemes.
“Just because a particular loyalty program scheme or proposition works well for a competitor or company you aspire to, doesn’t mean it’s right for you,” writes Terry Hunt. “The allure of a shiny new program or the gravitas of a tenured and well-known scheme in the market is not a guarantee of its success.” Before launching a loyalty program or similar scheme, marketers should ask themselves, “Which behaviours is it most important to reward? What do customers expect from us? What benefits will our customers most value from us? Will this give us a competitive advantage?” “…When you ask tough questions like these,” Hunt writes, “you begin to uncover the answers that will begin to shape your solution, which inevitably leads to one thing: helping your customers win.”
“President Trump, using more anecdote than evidence, is doing unto Google, Facebook and Twitter what he helped do to mainstream media: persuade a big chunk of America they are biased — and fake,” writes Mike Allen. Anew pollshows that 65 percent of self-described conservatives believe that social media companies purposely censor the right. “It’s risen to the level of being an emotional or gut issue with conservatives, like guns/immigration,” a Trump supporter told Allen. “It’s an issue that’s here to stay.” Top Republicans say this will be a major line of escalated attack at a congressional hearing next week with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Axios managing editor Kim Hart commented, “Trump has essentially hijacked the upcoming hearings. Classic Trump tactic that will likely rain on [the senators’ intended] parade on the disinformation front, and shift the focus to something that … resonates more with his base.”
The newspaper industry won an important victory Wednesday, when the International Trade Commission voted to eliminate costly tariffs on Canadian newsprint that were pinching newspapers across the U.S. But the impact on prices will be delayed rather than immediate, said Paul Boyle, who has led the News Media Alliance’s lobbying on the question. And it is not even certain that big reductions in paper costs will happen at all. As with energy costs, what goes up in times of a fuel shortage does not necessarily come down when that eases. For many reasons, it is impossible to say how much of the price increase damage has been mitigated. That will become clearer later, Boyle said.
The United States International Trade Commission on Wednesday overturned a Trump administration decision to impose tariffs on Canadian newsprint, saying that American paper producers are not harmed by newsprint imports. The unanimous decision by the five-member body eliminates tariffs that have been in effect since January, handing a win to small and medium-size newspapers, which have struggled to absorb the cost of higher newsprint and have made cuts, including layoffs, as a result. However, while the tariff ruling offers a reprieve to newspapers, publishers say it may not result in jobs coming back or pages being restored. Instead, it likely accelerated cost-cutting that would have eventually occurred anyway, given the industry’s declining readership and revenue. Jay Seaton, the publisher of The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in Colorado, said the changes newspapers made in response to the tariffs were probably inescapable “for newspapers who want to remain viable long into the future.”
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When The Ohio County Monitor in rural Kentucky launched a new subscription program last fall, the brothers who run the hyperlocal news site sought to more deeply connect with their readers. So Dustin and Lee Bratcher decided to take a listening tour across the 600-square-mile county, often rising before dawn to attend “liars tables” — male-only breakfast gatherings at general stores. A pair of university researchers, Andrea Wenzel and Sam Ford, came along for the ride. Their resulting study, “Engaged Journalism in Rural Communities,” won a new research prize aimed at fostering stronger ties between media professionals and scholars. “From a scholar’s perspective,” writes Jake Batsell, “the paper shows how theoretically driven research can bring timely insight to professional strategy. And for professionals, it shows the promise of initiatives to meet audiences where they already are, and invite them to contribute on their own terms.”
Sweden is heading towards a close election that could have a significant impact on the country’s political landscape. In a real-time news environment, and amidst growing concerns around “fake news,” the stakes are high for election coverage. Supported by the Google News Initiative, Pop-Up Newsroom Riksdagsvalet 2018 will see more than 100 journalists gathered in one place to monitor information flowing across digital sources in the final days leading up to the Sept. 9 election. Sweden’s media houses and Swedish voters will be able to ask the newsroom to turn its attention to specific subjects as the elections get underway.
“While many of us have been engrossed in the Instagram lives of our co-workers and peers, a backlash among young people has been quietly boiling,” writes Sirin Kale. One 2017 survey of British schoolchildren found that 63 percent would be happy if social media had never been invented. In another study of Generation Z (people born after 1995), half of those surveyed said they had quit or were considering quitting at least one social media platform. When it comes to Gen Z’s relationship to social media, “significant cracks are beginning to show,” said one researcher. Meanwhile, as young people increasingly reject social media, older generations increasingly embrace it: among the 45-plus age bracket, the proportion who value social media has increased from 23 percent to 28 percent in the past year.
With citizen journalism on the rise, and traditional newsrooms no longer the gatekeepers of news, it’s no longer a question ofifcommunities will play a role in producing news, buthow, writes Clements-Housser. That question formed the backbone of his research at the University of Oregon, during which he found that 80 percent of individuals surveyed supported a local news model where they had some say in how their news is produced, and 63 percent said the quality of their local news would benefit if they helped newsrooms identify newsworthy topics. All 11 of the newsrooms Clements-Housser also surveyed agreed with this last point, although only three had formal policies for utilizing content produced by members of the community. “Clearly, there remains quite a bit of ground to cover before the journalism industry finds a consistently good collaborative fit with the public,” he writes.
In a study with the News/Co Lab on consumer news awareness in Fresno, Calif., Kansas City, Mo., and Macon, Ga., researchers asked respondents to write down the first word that came to their minds when they were shown three terms: news, local news, and the name of a local news organization. “Fake” was overwhelmingly the most common response in all three surveys for the term “news.” For “local news,” positive words like “community” and “good” and negative words like “biased” and “boring” were prevalent. The Telegraph in Macon also elicited “outdated,” and The Fresno Bee and The Kansas City Star drew the word “liberal.” “It was striking that the word ‘fake’ came to mind so readily when respondents were presented with the word ‘news,’” researchers commented, although “fake” was not the word that came to mind for local news or for the specific news outlets. “Among potential criticisms the respondents seemed to have about the news is they saw it as biased and lacking transparency. They also did not seem to feel the news organizations engaged with them, and they felt low trust for the news organizations.”
+ Related: Another study found that “exposure to talk about fake news may lower individuals’ trust in media and lead them to identify real news with less accuracy.”So — should journalists stop using the term “fake news”?(Poynter)
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