The fact is . . .
In the absence of additional information, people tend to base their beliefs on the apparent familiarity of a statement, under the assumption that if they’ve heard it before, it’s probably true.
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Trust #7: Amid the flood of negative political ads, many islands of trustworthy news
There are thousands of independent media around the world — independent, that is, of political and commercial influence — that are aiming to serve their communities with trustworthy news and information that people can act upon.
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Trust #3: This media startup helps us sort through disinformation, propaganda
The shortage of trustworthy news created a business opportunity for NewsGuard I’m a non-paying subscriber to two newsletters from NewsGuard, whose slogan is “The Internet Trust Tool.” NewsGuard provides news reliability ratings for 35,000 news websites around the world, including all the big ones (I’ll share some of their ratings in a moment). They also […]
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Wikipedia is the greatest online service created in the internet age. And it’s not for sale.
It’s free, global, non-profit, and crowd-sourced; it strives for a neutral stance in a media world filled with trolls, polarization, and automated disinformation James Breiner The value of trust It’s hard to find information you can trust these days. Powerful algorithm-driven marketing machines flood us with news and reviews about everything from pizza to politics, […]
Read More »Part 1: Shakespeare the media entrepreneur
He innovated in a world rife with plagiarism, censorship, death threats, and worse What many people don’t know about Shakespeare the poet and playwright is that he became wealthy in the new media business of his time — public theater. Numerous startup companies built large open-air playhouses in London at the end of the 1500s. […]
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25 years ago, I discovered the Internet
Before Google and Facebook, high-speed fiber-optic service opened up the world A potentially embarrassing exercise is to read articles you wrote a few months or years ago. Sometimes it’s because you made predictions that were way off base. I was recently browsing through some old columns I wrote when I was publisher of the Baltimore […]
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What’s new in local, AI, and junk news
How recent articles have affected my thinking about the future of journalism One of my favorite recent articles was a newsletter post by Dick Tofel, former general manager of the investigative news site ProPublica. He asked the question, Time for local newspapers to go all-local? In other words, should local newspapers stop filling their web […]
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