Is science a match for sensationalism?

Tactics and strategies for engaging the public on climate change, vaccines Scientists have been battling for the hearts and minds of the public for centuries, and not always winning. To avoid being burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for heresy, Galileo had to deny that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than […]

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Juan Andrés Muñoz

Recalling 25 years of news in Spanish

CNN en Español, and one of its pioneers, celebrate an anniversary What follows is my translation of Ismael Nafría’s interview of Juan Andrés Muñoz, digital director of CNN en Español, on its 25th anniversary. The original interview, in Spanish, appeared on Nafría’s newsletter, Tendenci@s, on April 11, 2022. I have edited the original for length […]

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Ad fraud: another reason to have your own salesperson

Digital ad technology aids hoaxes, damages your site’s credibility In my last two blog posts I talked about why independent news sites need to have their own dedicated salespeople and how native advertising fits with that approach. In this post, I want to give you another reason to control your advertising sales. The digital advertising […]

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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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Why digital networks are ruling the world

For the last few years, the name Manuel Castells kept popping up in things I read about digital media, social networks, and mass communications. He is a Spanish sociologist who spent much of his career at UC Berkeley. Recently I have been reading his “The Rise of the Network Society,” the first of three volumes […]

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