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5:50 PM ET, December 29, 2019

Mediagazer

 Top News: 
David K. Li / NBC News:
Radio shock jock Don Imus, an early pioneer of the genre known for his controversial and often offensive statements, dies at 79  —  He had announced on Jan. 22 that he was retiring, telling fans: “Turn out the lights...the party's over.  —  Radio shock jock Don Imus, one of the early pioneers of his genre …
Sarah J. Jackson / New York Times:
In 2010s, Twitter enabled young and marginalized people to be heard, held news organizations accountable, and pushed largely ignored issues into the mainstream  —  It's impossible to avoid news about how harmful social media can be.  The Cambridge Analytica scandal.  The ubiquitous Russian bots.
RELATED:
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News:
A look back at how Facebook and Twitter evolved over the 2010s, chasing size and influence at a cost to society that will take years to understand
George P. Slefo / Ad Age:
Spotify will suspend political ads in early 2020, citing the lack of tools to review them; source: political ads are not a significant source of its revenue  —  Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders and the RNC are among Spotify advertisers  —  Spotify is suspending the sale of political advertising …
Ben Kamisar / NBC News:
An overview of NBC's special edition of Meet the Press, “Alternative Facts: Inside the Weaponization of Disinformation”  —  On a special edition of “Meet the Press,” top journalists discuss the challenges of finding the facts amid growing disinformation.
RELATED:
Jay Rosen / PressThink:
What Chuck Todd blamed on naiveté to lessen his error of ignoring the GOP's spread of disinfo was in fact willful blindness and malpractice
David Porter / 8tracks blog:
As 8tracks prepares to shut down on December 31, its co-founder shares a post-mortem of what went wrong with the once-promising music streaming startup  —  8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun.  We're sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind …
Mark Ledwich / Medium:
A new study finds that YouTube's late 2019 algorithm actively discourages users from watching radicalizing content, directing them to more mainstream videos  —  In 2018, Kevin Roose published a piece in the New York Times in which Caleb Cain, a liberal college dropout, described his experience …
Committee to Protect Journalists:
Interviews with six journalists working in Turkey, who have been taken into custody by authorities at least once and who have had their equipment confiscated  —  Turkey is notorious as a leading jailer of journalists worldwide, a fact that can overshadow the other problems for its press.
Matteo Moschella / First Draft:
Q&A with Lee Mwiti, the chief editor of Africa's first independent fact-checking website Africa Check, on disinformation and media manipulation on the continent  —  Lee Mwiti is the chief editor of Africa Check, the continent's first independent fact-checking website.
Heather Bryant / Nieman Lab:
In 2020, the question of how to save newsrooms will start to shift to how to save journalism as a process, emphasizing more collaboration and inclusiveness  —  Heather Bryant is founder and director of Project Facet.  —  There are always two conversations happening in any given field.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Comcast is in advanced talks to acquire Xumo, which offers an ad-supported video streaming service, as Comcast prepares to launch NBC's Peacock  —  Deal would help cable giant's digital-video ambitions as it prepares to launch its own video-streaming service
Emma Grey Ellis / Wired:
How The Dodo has achieved viral success by posting heartwarming videos about animals, racking up 2.3B views each month  —  The media empire's heartwarming (and highly shareable) animal videos rack up 2.3 billion views each month.  It might be our favorite website of the decade.  —  Frog is a rooster.
Discussion: @wiredculture and @wired
 
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 More News: 
Sara K. Baranowski / Nieman Lab:
2020 will be the start of an exciting era for community news with local outlets producing high-impact reporting that experiments with new formats and engagement
Shareen Pathak / Digiday:
Survey of 135 publishers: 50%+ say direct-sold ads are big source of revenue, 40% had no subscription rev, affiliate ads at most a small revenue source for 82%
 Earlier Picks: 
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire:
Q&A with Snopes CEO David Mikkelson and reporter Alex Kasprak on the state of news, working and breaking up with Facebook, and preparing for the 2020 election
Jim Milliot / Publishers Weekly:
Private equity firm KKR has signed a deal to acquire OverDrive from Rakuten USA; OverDrive helps libraries and schools access digital and audio books and more
Discussion: @markcoker
Katharine Q. Seelye / New York Times:
William Greider, a reporter, editor, and author who wrote about the economy and politics for WaPo, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other outlets, dies at 83
 

 
From Techmeme:

Lee-Anne Mulholland / The Keyword:
Google files its proposed remedies in the DOJ's search antitrust lawsuit, including letting browser companies have multiple default agreements across platforms

Reuters:
Albania bans TikTok for a year from January 2025, part of a broader plan to make schools safer following the killing of a 14-year-old near a school in November

Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Exploring the scaling challenges of transformer-based LLMs in efficiently processing large amounts of text, as well as potential solutions, such as RAG systems
 
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