Nothing like a spokesperson issuing assurances that BuzzFeed “remains focused on human-generated journalism” to make you feel good about the future of the news industry, right? The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a staff memo at BuzzFeed that laid out plans for the digital media company to use OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT —...
On March 21, 2007, The New York Times announced itself on Twitter: “Word up! It is I, the Gray Lady, with a ‘shoutout’ to all my hip young friends. Just wanted you to know I’ve added new specialized feeds.” “It was very important to me when I was writing that tweet that even though the...
Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account: the journalist or their employer? It’s an old question by now, a byproduct of the way social media has allowed reporters to create their own personal ~~brands~~, distinct from their news outlets. It’s become normal to see big-name journalists take their followings from job to job — from @BuzzFeedBen...
When Jarrett Carter Sr. launched HBCU Digest in 2010, it was to fill a gap in thoughtful and rigorous higher education journalism on historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. As a student at Morgan State University in the early 2000s, Carter wanted to be a sports writer. But one professor, Frank Dexter...
Many news organizations and other companies have been highly reluctant to let users cancel their subscriptions online, despite FTC pressure and the fact that people haaaaate talking to customer service. But what if refusing to allow subscribers to cancel online is not only annoying, but also actually counterproductive?1 The Minneapolis Star Tribune is working to...
Last November, Sahan Journal hosted a Facebook Live conversation for Somali parents in Minnesota. The host, Somali journalist Abdirizak Diis, interviewed a local teacher and an assistant principal in Somali about parents’ educational concerns post-pandemic. They then came up with a list of recommendations and steps parents could take to remedy the issues at hand....
One of Elon Musk’s stated reasons for purchasing Twitter was to use the social media platform to defend the right to free speech. The ability to defend that right, or to abuse it, lies in a specific piece of legislation passed in 1996, at the pre-dawn of the modern age of social media. The legislation,...
When researchers analyzed almost 6,000 political news stories produced by partisan and nonpartisan media outlets in 2021, three things became clear: Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets. Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote...
Last year, news outlets reported on a remarkable story: Two war crime researchers from the University of Amsterdam had catfished hundreds of Syrian intelligence officers and military officials who were loyal to the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. In 2018, the researchers created a fake, pro-Assad Facebook profile of a woman named “Anna Sh” to gain...