Top News:
Issie Lapowsky / Wired:
NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news sites, releases Chrome and Edge plug-ins to show detailed ratings, partners with libraries to educate readers — SAY YOU'RE SCROLLING through Facebook, see an article that seems a little hinky, and flag it.
Discussion:
@issielapowsky, @corb_the_lesser, BleepingComputer, Axios, @jbenton and Nieman Lab
Ben Collins / NBC News:
Reddit mods have notified Reddit employees since July 2017 of an Iranian disinformation operation on the site to no response; Reddit now says it's investigating — More than a year before the announcement from Facebook and Twitter, a group of moderators on Reddit noticed a peculiar pattern of submissions.
Discussion:
@oneunderscore__, @jasonmbrodsky, @farsightsecinc, Engadget and BuzzFeed News
Sarah Ellison / Washington Post:
Profile of Kimberly Guilfoyle, once wife of San Francisco's liberal mayor and long time Fox News host, who now dates Trump Jr. and vice-chairs a super PAC — In the summer of 2004, the new mayor and first lady of San Francisco were photographed for an eight-page spread in Harper's Bazaar.
Discussion:
New York Times and TVNewser
Daniel Funke / Poynter:
How Brazilian fact-checking project Aos Fatos used technology from British charity Full Fact to transcribe and fact-check a presidential debate in real time — Aos Fatos has a friend in Full Fact. — The Brazilian fact-checking project used technology from the latter during a presidential debate …
Joan E. Solsman / CNET:
How women, including Campbell Brown and Alex Hardiman, are commanding Facebook's efforts to foster more legitimate news reporting — At Facebook, where men outnumber women almost two to one, the future of news is female. — Alex Hardiman speaks softly. Leading a team meeting …
Discussion:
The Verge, more at Techmeme »
Brian Barrett / Wired:
How StoryBots, with 150 songs, 500M views, a Netflix series, and an educational arm grew out of a viral 2004 satirical political video — ON A LATE June day in 2012, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis uploaded five videos to YouTube. Each featured a quintet of monochromatic cartoon robots, catchy songs, and an educational slant.
Matt Binder / Mashable:
YouTube will roll out the ability to enable non-skippable ads, up to a maximum length of 20 seconds, to all creators in its Partner Program starting next week — You might soon be seeing less of that “skip ad” button over on YouTube. — In a video titled Want to earn more money from ad revenue? …
Discussion:
Engadget, more at Techmeme »
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
Chartbeat study: only a third of 159 publishers that adopted Google's AMP in 2017 saw clear statistical evidence of a traffic increase — Google unveiled its open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages format in 2016 to improve the mobile web by making pages load faster (and match Facebook's own fast Instant Articles format).
Andrew Marchand / New York Post:
Patricia Hernandez / The Verge:
The YouTube stream for the Logan Paul vs. KSI fight had ~773K viewers, at $10/view, but 1M+ people watched unofficial streams of the fight on Twitch at its peak — Most people didn't pay for the biggest event on YouTube — After months of hype, YouTube superstars Logan Paul …
Discussion:
Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, The Wrap, @slasher, The Drum, TechCrunch and The Guardian, more at Techmeme »
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
A small team from New York University is working on ways to archive news apps and make them accessible via browsers — What if all the interactives a news organization ever made could be stored somewhere, accessible in the same form forever, even as the technologies people might use to access them change?
Discussion:
@niemanlab
Jacqueline Howard / CNN:
Study: IRA-backed trolls flooded social media to amplify online debates about vaccines, often linking messages around vaccines to racial or class disparities — - Russian trolls and Twitter bots amplified online vaccine debates between 2014 and 2017, a new study suggests
Discussion:
@noupside, @timcwrites, @buzzfeednews, MediaPost, @bensasse, @noupside, @noupside, @noupside, BuzzFeed News, Fortune, Boing Boing, BBC, Gizmodo, Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Office of Media Relations and New York Times