Tag: news (page 1 of 3)

Traffic to news sites went up during the Facebook outage.

It’s really problematic that most people get their news via algorithmic news feeds.

On August 3, 2018, Facebook went down for 45 minutes. That’s a little baby outage compared to the one this week, when, on October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. Three years ago, the 45-minute Facebook break was enough to get people to go read news elsewhere, Chartbeat‘s Josh Schwartz wrote for us at the time.

So what happened this time around? For a whopping five-hours-plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. If Bad Art Friend had been published on the same day as the Facebook outage, Twitter would have literally exploded, presumably.)

Source: When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up » Nieman Journalism Lab

“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy”

Depending on what happens next year and in 2024, the US might not even be a democracy within this decade…

Source: Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim | YouTube

Criminals’ right to be forgotten

This is interesting: the Associated Press are no longer going to name people involved in minor crimes. I have to agree with their rationale.

These minor stories, which only cover an arrest, have long lives on the internet. AP’s broad distribution network can make it difficult for the suspects named in such items to later gain employment or just move on in their lives.

Broadly speaking, when evaluating such stories, we should consider first whether the story is worthy of our news report, and if distributing it is indeed useful to our members and customers. If the answer is yes, in keeping with AP’s commitment to fairness, we now will no longer name suspects in brief stories about minor crimes in which there is little chance AP will provide coverage beyond the initial arrest.

Source: AP Definitive Source | Why we’re no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories