“Number soup”: Can we make it easier for readers to digest all the numbers journalists stuff into their stories?
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Monday, August 1, 2022
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“Number soup”: Can we make it easier for readers to digest all the numbers journalists stuff into their stories?“Numbers do not speak for themselves. All the same, many people believe that they do. An ideology we call numerism, which accords a privileged epistemic status to quantification, is widespread.” By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
amaBhungane / Micah Reddy and Sam Sole
Who killed South Africa’s New Frame? →
“Almost all of the money came discreetly and indirectly from a sole benefactor — an American tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham.”
Vanity Fair / Charlotte Klein
How Sally Buzbee is putting her stamp on The Washington Post →
“She's focused heavily so far on overhauling the newsroom — ‘a lot of deeply unsexy infrastructure work,’ she admits — along with navigating international crises, from getting journalists out of Afghanistan to establishing a bureau in Kyiv to cover the war in Ukraine… Another mandate for Buzbee: make the rest of the paper as strong as [Marty] Baron made national politics and investigations.”
Gizmodo / Dell Cameron
Facebook has a week to fix its pro-genocide ad problem in Kenya →
“Nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove revealed Thursday that a third independent test had proven Facebook incapable of detecting language designed to incite violence around the August elections. Specifically, the groups said, Meta approved ads on Facebook in both Swahili and English that included calls to rape and behead Kenyan citizens along ethnic lines.”
Media Voices / Peter Houston
Medium’s Scott Lamb on the platform’s evolution and vision for the future →
“There's something that's slightly broken about the feedback loop on Medium. From previous experience, other platforms, usually the dynamics, even if they are difficult, are fairly clear…because the way that the platform works currently, that doesn't always result in their audience having some incremental stable and predictable growth…you get into this loop where you're writing and you're not seeing your audience grow.”
National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
These are the nominees for this year’s News & Documentary Emmys →
The leaders in nominations: ABC (39), CNN (37), PBS (28), Vice (28), CBS (26), HBO (23), The New York Times (19), National Geographic (15), Netflix (13), Showtime (12), Univision (12), Hulu (10), and NBC (10).
Curbed / Alice Markham-Cantor
Why is it so hard to buy a print copy of The New York Times? →
“At the height of their presence in New York, in the 1950s, there were 1,500 independent newsstands in Manhattan, hawking hundreds of dailies, weeklies, and magazines, and there's endured a belief that even with the demise of too many of those papers to list, we would always be able to buy a copy of the Times in its own city. Just try to find one in downtown Manhattan these days, though. It's a lot harder than you'd expect.”
The New York Times / Oscar Lopez
In a widening crackdown, a renowned journalist is arrested in Guatemala →
“José Rubén Zamora, president of the elPeriódico newspaper, was arrested at his home in Guatemala City on Friday night on charges including possible money laundering, blackmail and influence peddling, according to the Guatemalan attorney general's office.”
The New York Times / Jeremy W. Peters
Fox News, once home to Donald Trump, now often ignores him →
“In the former president's view, according to two people who have spoken to him recently, Fox's ignoring him is an affront far worse than running stories and commentary that he has complained are ‘too negative.’ The network is effectively displacing him from his favorite spot: the center of the news cycle.”
Press Gazette / Andrew Kersley
Wolfgang Blau: Newspapers downplay climate change in order to boost sales →
“I have often interacted with people at news organizations where they know perfectly well about the size of the risk we're facing from climate change and who, at the same time, make very short-term, opportunistic decisions in their framing of the issue based on what they thought would sell the most copies.”
Bloomberg / Mark Bergen
The Indian government’s fight against “fake news” is actually targeting political dissent →
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has grown more aggressive about rooting out cybercrimes and what it calls "fake news" on social media. Under Indian law, including rules issued in 2021, executives at companies that don't comply with content removal requests could face jail time. Twice this year, Indian journalists have been arrested for online activities in cases that attracted international attention.”
CNN / Oliver Darcy
Alex Jones’ Infowars owner has filed for bankruptcy, possibly shielding assets from the Sandy Hook parents suing him →
“…an unexpected move that comes as a trial is underway in Texas to determine how much in damages he will have to pay the families of two Sandy Hook victims who sued and won a default judgment against him.”
Miami Herald / Sarah Blaskey
How Florida Power & Light secretly took over a statewide news site and used it to bash its critics →
“The Capitolist portrayed itself as an independent outlet, but it was bankrolled and controlled by FPL execs to push for rate hikes and legislative favors and slam any opponent, a Miami Herald investigation found. To help keep the deal secret, a political consulting firm employed the intermediaries between the FPL executives and the Capitolist.”
Agence France-Presse
Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta is being stripped of licence to publish →
“In March, Novaya Gazeta said it was suspending operations for the duration of the Ukraine war after it became a crime to report anything on the conflict that veered from the government line. The temporary suspension was designed to save the publication from shutdown amid draconian laws that have essentially banned any criticism of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.”
AL.com / Kent Faulk
An Alabama prison tried to block a reporter from witnessing an execution because her skirt was “too short” →
“[Ivana] Hrynkiw, an award-winning journalist, has attended and witnessed seven executions.”
The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin and Lauren Hirsch
A Greek broadcaster is interested in buying Vice Media →
“Antenna is not the only potential buyer to have expressed interest in Vice, which rode a wave of optimism in digital media to an eye-popping $5.7 billion valuation in 2017 before battling broader headwinds facing the sector. It is not assured that Antenna will buy Vice, nor that there will be a deal at all.”
The New York Times / Reggie Ugwu
Reintroducing Sam Sanders, unleashed →
“For Sanders, 37, ‘Into It’ is both a reset and a moment of emancipation. He spent 12 years in public radio, first coming to prominence, during the 2016 presidential election, as one of the original co-hosts of the ‘NPR Politics Podcast.’ Throughout that time, he says, he had been honing a persona that felt cramped on public radio but takes center stage on "Into It": uncensored, uninhibited and unbothered.”
The Guardian / Jim Waterson
Grubby and dated? Why “Wagatha Christie” may be last British libel case of its kind →
“Yet the law has struggled to keep up with changing public attitudes to privacy and libel law. Based on the public response to the case there is still bafflement among some that Rooney's social media post could be held to the same journalistic standards as an article on a mainstream news website — even though Rooney's post was read by far more people than most newspaper articles.”
The Washington Post / Erik Wemple
A court’s ruling against Nick Sandmann doesn’t vindicate the media outlets who wrote about him →
“Protections for opinions are grounded in Supreme Court doctrine: ‘Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas,’ reads the ruling in the 1974 case Gertz v. Welch.”
The Washington Post / Marc Fisher
R.I.P. Larry Josephson, pioneer of freeform radio →
“Bored working as a computer engineer at IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Larry Josephson began volunteering in the mid-1960s at WBAI, a ragtag listener-supported FM station in New York City where he was assigned to host the morning show because, he said, no one else at the station was willing to wake up that early.”
The Guardian / Dan Milmo and Alex Hern
“Stop trying to be TikTok”: How the new video-centric Instagram sparked a revolt →
“The core accusation was that Instagram was mimicking its arch-rival TikTok at the expense of a loyal user base that wanted renewed emphasis on its photo-sharing origins. The original post by the US photographer Tati Bruening, added: ‘Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends.'”
The Verge / Alex Heath
Facebook’ quarterly revenue just declined for the first time ever →
“Apple's "Ask app not to track" prompt on iPhones has made its ads much less effective, costing Meta $10 billion in ad revenue last year alone. And now a rapidly slowing economy has caused advertisers to pull back on their spending.”
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