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
#DigitalDeceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet. A new report from the Shorenstein Center’s Dipayan Ghosh and New America’s Ben Smith examines the role of behavioral data tracking, online ad buying, search engine optimization and AI in the spread of mis- and dis-information. The report was featured in The New York Times article Once Cozy With Silicon Valley, Democrats Grow Wary of Tech Giants.
News from Faculty and Fellows
What Facebook’s Feed Changes Mean for the News. “The potential impact on publishers will depend on the extent to which traffic from Facebook is a significant percentage of a publisher’s traffic and, more significantly, its revenue,” says Nicco Mele, Shorenstein Center director, in The Wall Street Journal. Mele also comments on Facebook’s changes in USA Today.
Media outlets struggle to assign blame for shutdown. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, fall 2017 fellow, says that “When the narrative structure is clear, the headlines are all virtually identical. They’re not. What that says is the press is dealing with a high level of complexity here.”
Trump and the Media
- Assessing Trump’s press freedom record, one year on, from Columbia Journalism Review.
- It’s time to rethink how we cover Trump, from Columbia Journalism Review.
Facebook, Google, and News
- Facebook to rank news outlets by trustworthiness, from CNN.
- Facebook news-feed changes will cut into publishers’ branded-content revenue, from Digiday.
- Facebook’s latest changes will probably make misinformation worse, from Columbia Journalism Review.
- Facebook Is in a Trust Crisis, from
- Google suspends fact-checking feature over quality concerns, from Poynter.
- Google’s emphasis on mobile page speed will hit CNN, WSJ and other top sites, from Digiday.
Conservative Media
How the Drudge Report ushered in the age of Trump, from The Guardian.
Fresh Ideas
- How The New York Times is using interactive tools to build loyalty (and ultimately subscriptions), from Digiday.
- Reinventing Represent: We asked readers to help us reconceive and redesign an interactive database that tracks Congress. Here’s how the process worked. From
- What ‘Engagement Reporting’ Is and Why It Matters, from MediaShift.
- Why Social Media Editors Should be Better Integrated into Newsrooms, from MediaShift.
