Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
.entry-header December 20, 2016, 6:35 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Linkedin Share icons In what appears to be the largest digital advertising scam in history, a group of Russian hackers reportedly built a click-fraud machine that stole up to $5 million daily from top advertisers and publishers. But even that is just the tip of…
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of…
In early July, a website made to look like a real news organization published what would prove to be one of the biggest fake news hits of the US election. WTOE5News.com was barely two weeks old when it published the hoax story, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” It improbably…
Facebook is partnering with fact checking organizations to eliminate the scourge of fake news from your feed, only it doesn’t seem like partnering. Aren’t partners supposed to treat each other like equals? Many of the common objections* to journalism by the alt-right center around news being click-bait and rather uninformed discussions of impression-based advertising. The…
Facebook, which has long relied on other people to provide it with content, is going to start paying for its own stuff, too. Facebook is starting to talk to TV studios and other video producers about licensing shows, with the hope of boosting the social network’s video efforts. The talks, which include discussions for scripted…
As print revenue continues to shrink, legacy publishers are facing the question (again) of how to deploy their (also shrinking) staffs. In the early days of the web, print publishers had digital operations that were separate from their print teams, and often considered second-class; understandable, considering most of their money was and is still being…
The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy. On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed,…
ComScore gave its investors a pre-Thanksgiving turkey Wednesday evening in the form of another disclosure about improperly recorded revenue. In a filing buried after the market closed ahead of the holiday, the media-measurement company said it would need to adjust the accounting treatment for some past monetary transactions, primarily because of errors related to timing of revenue recognition….
The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg – headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” – cites a report by…