Frustrated fact-checkers: the lies keep being told

Lies have a life of their own, and people want to believe them, especially when they are about people they don’t like, “the other”. Facts don’t sway people. As Laura Hazard Owen recently reported in Nieman Lab, three leading fact-checking organizations have said their work needs to go beyond simply calling out the lies of […]

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Investigative journalism: great return on investment

Between fines and recovered funds, journalists get results Lately a couple of us here at the University of Navarra have been looking for models of high-quality journalism that are sustainable. As it turns out, many of the best news organizations that are thriving are doing investigative journalism. Readers like this type of journalism, which holds […]

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In Eastern Europe, a media battle for hearts and minds

Many of the right-wing or nationalist leaders of Eastern and Central Europe have been winning votes by attacking the political correctness of the European Union and its allies. And they have chosen as their whipping boy George Soros, the billionaire and philanthropist whose Open Society Foundations have been funding programs that promote Western democratic values […]

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People are more important than the product

Reflections on several decades of managing news publications A student in a media management course had to interview a media professional for his final research project. I agreed to be his subject, and in the course of an hour, he got me to talk about my philosophy of management in the digital era. Reading over […]

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Smart money is betting on local, trustworthy news

This blog post started out as an explanation to my friends and family in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, why their local newspapers had become shadows of their former selves. Why their newspapers were so thin. Why news coverage was so shallow. Why they felt like they weren’t getting their money’s worth. And we will get […]

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1997, the year broadband arrived

Digging through some old files recently, I came across a column I wrote for the Baltimore Business Journal 22 years ago. It described how our cable TV and internet provider had installed fiber-optic cable in the neighborhood. This new distribution channel transformed a clunky dialup internet service into a lightning fast information source. The hyperbole […]

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