The QAnon narrative shows the need for better practices in reporting on baseless claims and hoaxes. Here’s how the media can take action

America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase. Look no further than today’s grim announcement from the New York Daily News, a once proud fighter in the city’s news wars. On Monday, the tabloid’s owner, Tronc, announced the latest in a slog of job cuts, this one totaling 50 percent of the staff and […]

"There is no Wirecutter for low-income individuals." Fiona Morgan and Jay Hamilton talk about their research into information ecosystems and the media market.

This article applies economic principles to an exploration of how information is produced for, acquired by, and utilized by low-income individuals in the United States. Low values placed on changing decisions by those with less income translate through supply and demand into lower quantities and qualities of content created for their benefit. The geography of poverty may mean less accountability journalism in poor communities. Behavioral economics helps explain the particularly challenging choice architectures and cognitive loads faced by decision makers with low incomes. When companies target individuals with low literacy rates and education, fraud and deception can leave them worse off. In government information policies aimed at redistribution, subsidies often flow to intermediaries rather than the intended beneficiaries. Many central research questions about the information lives of low-income individuals remain open, though policies and programs taking these economic factors into account can aid in their decision making.

Co-authored with Megan Fromm Last week, after spending 30 hours observing a high school journalism classroom, freelance writer and editor  (and PBS MediaShift editorial assistant) Angela Washeck gave a first-person analysis of how today’s students are producing media. The product of high school media classes, in many cases a yearbook or newspaper, is no more […]

Source: 2011 Scholastic Journalism Census A new study reveals that while student media presence remains strong, only one-third of schools surveyed…

Fewer resources, lack of interest and the Internet have led to fewer high school newspapers in the city’s public schools.

In just six months, an innovative partnership between Flipboard and the Journalism Education Association has led to 100 new pieces of digital journalism by high school students and more than 2,500 followers to a digital magazine to showcase the best scholastic journalism in the country. “It was exciting to get published by a broader national organization and […]

Having survived my senior year at Palo Alto High School, I think I can safely say that thus far in my education, the most useful thing I have done to develop my intellectual vitality has been joining my high school magazine, Verde. Although most high schools focus solely on a yearbook or a newspaper, Paly […]

Good issue brief.

Another week, another paywall. This time, it’s Bloomberg, which announced that it would be adding a comprehensive paywall to its news service and television channel (except TicToc, its media partnership with Twitter). A paywall was hardly a surprise, but what was surprising was the price: the standard subscription is $35 a month (up from $0 […]

"We like to think of ourselves as the paper of record, but then it’s important that we actually keep those records."

An overview of the tagging process at The New York Times. The Times uses a software tool for rules-based categorization to assign metadata to content. This is followed by human supervised review and tagging.

Our tech columnist tried to skip digital news for a while. His old-school experiment led to three main conclusions.

On the disappearance of the digital archives of newly-dead newspapers.

A new report by Knight Foundation explores how social media subcultures — Black Twitter, Feminist Twitter, and Asian American Twitter — interact with the news.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and why I did it.

As local news outlets disappear in America, some libraries are gaining new relevance.

Executive Summary Too often we tend to hear one single narrative about the state of newspapers in the United States. The newspaper industry is not one sector. While there are considerable variances between the myriad of outlets—whether national titles, major metros, dailies in large towns, alt weeklies, publications in rural communities, ethnic press, and so […]