Reasons for optimism #6: Jared Diamond and other cautious optimists

Leaders in academia, business, journalism are collaborating on urgent global crises Why write about “reasons for optimism” when so much is going wrong in our politics, economy, and environment? Optimism gives us confidence that we can make things better. As I like to say, today is another day of opportunity. Jared Diamond, whose bestsellers have […]

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How publisher credibility creates economic value

Transparency is key to strengthening trust in media People tell each other stories all the time to make sense of the world. At the moment, various storytellers are competing for our attention. Their motives vary wildly: to surprise, distract, entertain, confuse, create envy, win votes, inspire hatred, make money, and, in some cases, to perform […]

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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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14,500 friends lay out cash for aggressive journalism

Amid all the bad news about business models for high-quality journalism, eldiario.es (“The Daily”) in Spain shows that good journalism can be good business. Escolar: “Journalism is a public service that has to be profitable” Its founder and CEO, Ignacio Escolar, just announced that the publication finished 2015 with revenues of US$ 2.6 million, up […]

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An exercise on usability puts theory into practice

At the end of a semester-long course in digital journalism, I asked my students at the University of Navarra in Spain to say what they thought was the most interesting or useful part of the course. The survey was anonymous, so I give it some credibility. The question was open-ended. The second-most-mentioned item was a […]

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