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With its Facebook Watch news show, Alabama’s Reckon wants to make a national audience care about local news

We’ve gotten a sense of what local publishers can contribute to some of Facebook’s bigger projects, like Facebook Watch. They’ve shared a documentary on a Texas high school football team, a three-season show exploring Long Island’s food scene, and more. Soon, we’ll have a taste of a local publisher’s first news show on Facebook Watch, as Alabama-based staffers from Advance Local rev their engines to traverse the country and highlight local investigative news for a national audience. “We knew that Facebook was looking for news, and we also knew we were not, from Alabama, going to be able to give you a recap on the day’s national news or do a number of things that you see the other brands were selected to do,” Michelle Holmes, the VP of content at Advance Local. (ABC News is putting together a daily news show, Anderson Cooper is doing daily Continue reading "With its Facebook Watch news show, Alabama’s Reckon wants to make a national audience care about local news"
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There’s a big difference between the number of people who worry about fake news and who say they’ve actually seen it

“The biggest single gap between perception and what people actually see.” The Reuters Digital News Report for 2018 — which we wrote up here — includes big sections on fake news and misinformation. A few takeaways: — People worry about fake news, but have trouble thinking of times they’ve actually seen it.
In focus groups (UK, US, Brazil, Germany this year) we find that ordinary people spontaneously raise the issue of ‘fake news’ in a way they didn’t a year ago. This is not surprising given extensive use by some politicians to describe media they don’t like — and widespread coverage by the media. But we find audience perceptions of these issues are very different from those of politicians and media insiders. Yes, people worry about fabricated or ‘made up’ news (58 percent), but they struggle to find examples of when they’ve actually seen this (26 percent). Of all
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After years of growth, the use of social media for news is falling across the world

People are becoming disenchanted with Facebook for news. The “Trump bump” appears to be sustaining itself. And younger people are more likely to donate money to a news organization than older people. These are some of the findings from a big new report out Thursday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2018 surveyed more than 74,000 people in 37 countries about their digital news consumption. (Included in the report for the first time this year: Bulgaria.) The research is based on online YouGov surveys earlier this year, followed by face-to-face focus groups in the U.S., U.K., German, and Brazil on the topics of social media and messaging apps. The report includes a number of findings on fake news, misinformation, and trust in the media; for more on those topics, see this piece by the report’s
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In the U.S., the left trusts the mainstream media more than the right, and the gap is growing

As Facebook moves to privilege “broadly trusted” sources in its News Feed, our research shows that broadcasters and newspapers are more trusted than digital-born outlets across a number of countries. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would prioritize news from brands that its users perceive as trustworthy, as part of a response to allegations related to the spread of misinformation on the platform. “As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote. Facebook measures news brand trust by asking its users if they have heard of a news brand and then to rate it as trustworthy from 1 (entirely) to 5 (not at all). Critics have speculated that allowing ordinary people to decide what news sources should be deemed trustworthy could result in niche or highly partisan sources
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For the World Cup, livestreamed online video is threatening to score the equalizer on traditional TV

Nearly as many people plan to watch this summer’s World Cup via livestreamed video as on regular ol’ live TV, a new study out today from the Interactive Advertising Bureau says. It’s another sign (if we still need one) of how even live sports — cable companies’ best hope for saving something like the traditional channel bundle — is giving way to digital. IAB’s study — which surveyed 4,200 people in 21 countries around the world — found 71 percent said they were extremely or probably likely to watch matches live on TV, versus 65 percent online. In some countries, digital streaming actually beat TV — including in China (+6 percentage points), Russia (+7), Saudi Arabia (+2), United Arab Emirates (+1), and even the United States (+1). (American soccer fans have lots of unused rooting capacity ready to assign to one of the 32 countries that actually qualified for the
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“Did you even READ the piece?” This startup wants to make that question obsolete for commenters

Let’s be honest: Are you going to read this or skim this? In a land of feeds, tidbits, and bullet points, readers don’t often get to the end of a piece — let alone absorb each sentence along the way. But what if you couldn’t comment until you actually read the whole piece? (We see you moving toward that close-the-tab button — hold on.) What if there was a gauge in your browser bar recording and showing you how much you’d read of a piece? Would you — or your readers — read more thoroughly? That’s the schtick of ReallyRead.It, a startup finishing up Matter’s eighth cohort and developed by Bill Loundy and Jeff Camera. The pair, buddies since preschool with experience in the startup world, were frustrated by the unproductive comments sections they saw attached to news articles. So they decided to create a mechanism for
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Civil promises that you don’t have to care about blockchain to care about what it’s doing (also, its first newsrooms just launched)

In the future, all of our news will come from and be about blockchain; at least, I assume that’s true, based on the number of pitches that I’ve received over the past few months. The most prominent blockchain journalism startup, Civil — the “decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism” — took a step forward this week after months of buildup, launching its first two sites, with more on the way. Much of the messaging around Civil has irritated and/or confused me from the start. The endless white paper, the slow buildup of blog posts about the future of journalism long before there was a single actual story to read. It started to feel like Ev Williams’ advertising-is-bad pivot posts but with even less to back them up than Medium’s constantly shifting plan to save journalism. Last year, we covered the hard-to-understand idea behind Civil using more succinct language than anything Continue reading "Civil promises that you don’t have to care about blockchain to care about what it’s doing (also, its first newsrooms just launched)"