Embarrassing to admit: I avoid (some) news

I’m part of a worldwide trend, with women and men showing different tendencies James Breiner It’s a big event in journalism when the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism releases its annual Digital News Report. This year’s edition had loads of data on “news avoidance,” or people actively avoiding news. (Survey methodology here.) A […]

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How the press is struggling against ‘toxic’ disinformation

Facts and science don’t matter in the new media ecosystem What follows is the abstract of my paper just published by Comunicación y Hombre, of the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria. The emergence of search engines and social media networks in the past two decades created a new media ecosystem. It allowed the instantaneous creation, distribution, […]

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The danger isn’t algorithms but the humans who write them

A former student recently interviewed me on the use of algorithms in social networks. He was doing a research project for another journalism professor. Weren’t these algorithms leading to the spread of disinformation in the news? he asked. Yes, the algorithms had allowed for the rapid spread of hoaxes and conspiracy theories related to covid-19. […]

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Three businesses help users find trustworthy information

As we all struggle to make sense of the flood of disinformation and misinformation in digital media, some entrepreneurs are developing businesses to help us identify the good stuff, the credible stuff. At the heart of one of the three business models is transparency–full disclosure–to increase our trust of particular media. And the other two […]

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