Our weekly roundup of news found at the intersection of media, politics, policy and technology, from the Shorenstein Center and from around the web. Sign up to receive Media and Politics Must Reads in your inbox each week. Also connect with us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.
This Week at the Shorenstein Center
Shorenstein Center Announces Spring 2018 Fellows, A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence. Our spring 2018 fellows will focus on topics such as race relations, the urban/rural divide, the role of algorithms in society, and climate change. Welcome Jelani Cobb, Elizabeth Arnold, Dipayan Ghosh, Genevieve Roth, Sarah Smarsh, Hossein Derakhshan, and Tom Wheeler!
News from Fellows
MediaShift20: Recognizing Digital Media’s Top Innovators. Congratulations to Claire Wardle, research fellow, who was named a top innovator on MediaShift’s annual list.
The Gene-Editing Conversation. Promoting a global conversation about gene editing will require unprecedented investments from scientists, journalists, and philanthropists, argues Matthew Nisbet, fall 2012 fellow, in a column in American Scientist.
New guide helps journalists, researchers investigate misinformation, memes and trolling. First Draft and the Public Data Lab have released their Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders. This free, open-access guide for students, journalists and researchers provides a series of visual “recipes” capturing how digital platforms shape misleading information.
President Trump and Media
- Automated, live fact-checks during the State of the Union? The Tech & Check Cooperative’s first beta test hopes to pull it off, from Nieman Lab.
- ‘We’re not doctors’: The perils for journalists in assessing Trump’s mental health, from The Washington Post.
- In response to Trump’s fake news awards, CPJ announces Press Oppressors awards, from Committee to Protect Journalists.
New Studies
- Fewer Americans rely on TV news; what type they watch varies by who they are, from Pew Research Center.
- Global unhappiness with the news media is high. In the U.S. (surprise!) partisanship drives what people think about the media, from Nieman Lab.
- Crossing the Line: What Counts as Online Harassment? From Pew Research Center.
Transparency
- I’ve Sent Out 1,018 Open Records Requests, and This Is What I’ve Learned, from ProPublica.
- In its first year, the Trump administration has reduced public information online, from Sunlight Foundation.
Trust in Media
- Five Tools to Rebuild Trust in Media, from Nieman Lab.
- Can civility save journalism? 5 good questions with researcher Ashley Muddiman, from American Press Institute.
Tech and News
- Google is fixing an error that led to smaller sites disappearing from Google News, from Tech Crunch.
- Journalism schools still behind on cybersecurity training, new survey finds, from Columbia Journalism Review.
- One year in, Facebook Journalism Project gets mixed reviews from publishers, from Digiday.
- Facebook is testing a new section of the app specifically for local news and events, from Recode.
- What does Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge of fixing Facebook’s issues mean for the fate of news on the platform? From Nieman Lab.
- How WeChat became the primary news source in China, from Columbia Journalism Review.
Conservative Media
Conservative media face a post-Bannon landscape, from Politico.
