Journalism
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Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In… Continue reading
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Lost and found stories
A few weeks ago, in Where journalism fails, I wrote about how journalism, for all its high-minded (and essential) purposes, is still interested only in stories. I explained that stories have just three requirements—character, problem, and movement—and that, by focusing on those three requirements alone, journalism excludes a boundless volume of facts, many of which actually matter.… Continue reading
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There are better ways to save journalism
In a Columbia Journalism Review op-ed, Bernie Sanders presents a plan to save journalism that begins, WALTER CRONKITE ONCE SAID that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we… Continue reading
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Where Journalism Fails
“What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story. Or, in the parlance of the moment, The Narrative. (Trend. More about that below.) I was just 22 when I wrote my first stories as a journalist, reporting… Continue reading
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Without aligning incentives, we can’t kill fake news or save journalism
It’s time to move past the toxic and destructive business called adtech: surveillance-based advertising. Adtech is the Agent Smith of digital advertising: a rogue programmatic approach to digital advertising that rationalizes tracking people like marked animals. Today adtech is the main business model for nearly all of online publishing, including nearly all the news sites reporting endlessly and ironically on how… Continue reading
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The Spinner’s hack on journalism
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person. It works like this: You pay The Spinner* $29. For example, to urge a friend to… Continue reading
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Is this a turning point for publishing?
Publishing and advertising both need to bend back toward where they came from, and what works. I see hope for that in the news today. In Refinery29 Lays Off 10% of Staff as 2018 Revenue Comes Up Short, by Todd Spangler, (@xpangler) of Variety reports, Digital media company Refinery29, facing a 5% revenue shortfall for the year, is… Continue reading
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Journalism without Twitter
So I’m taking live notes at Blockchain in Journalism: Promise and Practice, happening at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, in the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, to name the four Russian dolls whose innards I’m inhabiting here In advance of this gathering, Linux Journal, which I serve as editor-in-chief… Continue reading
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On presuming competence
A few weeks ago, while our car honked its way through dense traffic in Delhi, I imagined an Onion headline: American Visitor Seeks To Explain What He’ll Never Understand About India. By the norms of traffic laws in countries where people tend to obey them, vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the dense parts of Indian… Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” (Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process.) One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the tracking-based form of advertising… Continue reading
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For privacy we need tech more than policy
To get real privacy in the online world, we need to get the tech horse in front of the policy cart. So far we haven’t done that. Let me explain… Nature and the Internet both came without privacy. The difference is that we’ve invented privacy tech in the natural world, starting with clothing and shelter,… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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The real problem is Decoy News (and decoy content of all kinds)—and the platforms can’t fix it
The term “fake news” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S. Starting in November 2016, fake news was the subject of strong and well-researched coverage by NPR (here and here), Buzzfeed, CBS (here and here),… Continue reading
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Requiem for a great magazine
Linux Journal is folding. Carlie Fairchild, who has run the magazine almost since it started in 1994, posted Linux Journal Ceases Publication today on the website. So far all of the comments have been positive, which they should be. Throughout its life, Linux Journal has been about as valuable as a trade pub can be,… Continue reading
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Still no serious coverage of pirate radio
Here’s what I wrote about pirate radio in New York, back in 2013 . I hoped to bait major media attention with that. Got zip. Then I wrote this in 2015 (when I also took the screen shot, above, of a local pirate’s ID on my kitchen radio). I got a couple people interested, including one college student,… Continue reading
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Tab closings
These are all the non-advertising-related items I just moved out of this post here on doc.blog. This Wired piece on podcasting’s history fails to mention either Dave Winer or RSS. Huge oversights, those. Without mentioning the Wired piece, Dave offers many corrections. Mount Hope Cemetery in Lander, Wyoming: the final resting place of many memorable characters in Ethel Waxham… Continue reading
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The Daily Tab for 2017_06_06
Required viewing: A Good American, a documentary on Bill Binney and the NSA by @FriedrichMoser. IMHO, this is the real Snowden movie. And I say that with full respect for Snowden. Please watch it. (Disclosure: I have spent quality time with both Bill and Fritz, and believe in both.) Bonus dude: @KirkWiebe, also ex-NSA and a colleague of Bill’s.… Continue reading
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Loose Links
Jamie Bartlett in The Guardian: Forget far-right populism – crypto-anarchists are the new masters. Well, yes, no and maybe. Hard to tell. At least it’s a good look around many curves. Says here Robert E. Lee was a bad guy. Specifically, a white supremacist and slave abuser. You’re hundreds (or thousands) of miles but only one… Continue reading
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Brands need to fire adtech
Brands are starting to bail from adtech, and news about it is coming fast and hard. The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more… Continue reading