“Activist” is a loaded word, writes Tara Murtha.
“Certainly, there are occasions when ‘activist’ is an appropriate way to identify a participant in an article,” she writes. “Often, though, identifying someone as an ‘activist’ is a subtle but effective way to degrade the person you are quoting and their perspective by erasing credentials and professional expertise.”
By Casey Bukro
NewsGuard Technologies is recruiting veteran journalists to fight fake news by color-coding 7,500 news and information websites and video channels in the United States green, yellow and red.
A red rating goes to purveyors of consistently and intentionally false information or propaganda.
Now in the process of recruiting and training qualified journalists to be NewsGuard analysts, the enterprise, based in New York and Chicago, will begin operating in time for the mid-term elections in November.
The 7,500 news sources targeted account for 98 percent of the news articles read and shared in the English language online in the United States. After launching in the U.S., NewsGuard will expand to serve billions of people globally who get news online.
“Our goal is to help solve this (fake news) problem now by using human beings – trained, experienced journalists – who will operate under a transparent, accountable process to apply basic common sense to a growing scourge that clearly cannot be solved by algorithms,” said co-founder Steven Brill, longtime journalist and media entrepreneur.
The founders raised $6 million to launch NewsGuard.
In addition to color-coding websites or online publications, NewsGuard plans to issue Nutrition Labels that will explain the history of the site, what it attempts to cover, who owns it and who edits it. The labels also will reveal financing, notable awards or mistakes, whether the publisher upholds transparency standards or repeatedly is found at fault.
Two NewsGuard analysts will independently review and rate each site or online publication. One will draft the Nutrition Label and the other will edit it. The public can access these reviews to see why publishers got the green, yellow or red ratings.
Any disagreement between the two analysts is resolved by NewGuard’s senior editorial officers, including Brill, cofounder Gordon Crovitz, former Wall Street Journal publisher, James Warren, former Chicago Tribune managing editor and Eric Effron, former Legal Times editor and publisher.
Warren is NewsGuard’s executive editor and Effron is managing editor.
The lead investor in NewsGuard, among 18 investors, is Publicis Groupe, based in Paris. It is a French multinational advertising and public relations company, and the oldest and one of the largest marketing and communications companies in the world, by revenue.
Psychographics and electoral corruption: Adrian Chen finds that “the model of the voter as a bundle of psychological vulnerabilities to be carefully exploited reduces people to mathematical inputs.”
Data-obsessed political marketing can undermine democracy, he writes.
Who rates an obit? The New York Times ponders why most obituaries are still of white men.
“So why not more women and people of color on the obituary pages?” asks its obituaries editor. “Why, for that matter, not more openly gay people, or transgender people?” Obits are among the most heavily read parts of media.
A Washington state law lifts prior review on student journalism by school officials, writes Rachel Sun.
In 2018-19, Washington state student journalists at public schools and colleges are free to publish what they want without interference by school officials.
Student journalists are journalists and deserve to have their rights protected, says a student. They are tomorrow’s professional journalists.
Capturing female attention: The Cut, a magazine women’s section, offers nuance, empathy and reverence for women’s inner lives, writes Amanda Palleschi, saying The Cut stands out in a crowded women’s media world in editorial gravitas and reach.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for us to specifically advance a partisan agenda as much as it is that we publish really smart, thoughtful, potentially even unpopular thoughts,” says The Cut’s editor in chief and president.
In a human-centric field like journalism, how are newsrooms putting artificial intelligence ethics into practice? asks Christine Schmidt. BBC and Al Jazeera tell how they plan to do it.
“We have to remember, as media, we are gatekeepers to people’s understanding of the modern world,” says a source.
Indira Lakshmanan calls off-the-record interviews a trap.
“We earn public trust by providing true and accurate information and being clear with our audience and our sources about the ground rules under which we gather news,” she writes. “If news is in the public interest and we can’t inform the public, we’re not doing our jobs.”
Using a 2005 photo of a young woman posing in a British strip club was not an invasion of privacy, ruled the Independent Press Standards Organization.
Sydney Smith writes that IPSO found a news outlet may consider a voluntary action in the past fair game in the future.
The newspaper volunteered to take down the photo as a goodwill gesture and said it “understood that when one is young, one can make choices which are later regretted.”
Unplugging from the internet, a questionable experiment: Dan Mitchell questions the accuracy of a New York Times columnist’s claim that he went offline, dispensing avuncular advice to his readers about the benefits of slowing down one’s news consumption.
“But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all,” writes Mitchell.
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 