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N E W S L E T T E R D I E D E L M A N I TA L I A
MAGGIO 2017
PLATFORMS BECOME
PUBLISHERS
It is no coincidence that
the main sponsors of the
11-year-old International
Journalism Festival, were
Facebook, Google, Amazon,
and wordpress.com besides
the Italian energy company
ENI.
This yearly media summit
showed the influence of
social media platforms
and technology companies
is having a greater effect
on global journalism than
even the shift from print to
digital
These
platforms
have
evolved beyond their role
as distribution channels,
and now control what
audiences see and who gets
paid for their attention, and
even what format and type
of journalism flourishes.
In the span of 20 years,
journalism has experienced
three significant changes in
business and distribution
models: the switch from
analog to digital. the rise
of the social web, and now
the dominance of mobile.
In brief, platforms have
become
publishers
in
a short space of time,
leaving news organizations
confused about their own
future.
If the speed of convergence
continues,
more
news
organizations are likely
to
cease
publishing:
distributing, hosting and
monetizing as a core
(Continued)
2017 International
Journalism Festival
Fake (or false) news: “It will take years to
dig out of this mess”
According to The Guardian, in the past there was
news and “not news”. Now there is “fake news”,
a term that identifies all the news or the stories
that we can find on internet that are not true. But
platforms now prefer to call it “misrepresentation”
or “misleading”.
The issue characterized both Brexit and US elections
and the topic became the leitmotif in the next round
of European consultations, but it was at Donald
Trump’s first press conference as President elect
when this
term
broke
into media discussions. “You
INSIDE
THE
NEWSLETare fake news”, he pointed at CNN’s Jim Acosta while
refusing to take his question. Facebook has released
new tools to take on the spread of fake news. The
update will make it easier for users to report hoax
stories and also bring in third-party fact checking to
investigate and flag reported stories. Facebook will
also be looking at how many people share articles
after they’ve read them and combine this data with
disputed flags to push fake stories to the bottom of
news feeds.
INSIDE THE NEWSLETTER
u
COMPANIES OR THE MEDIA:
WHERE DO READERS GET
THEIR NEWS FROM? P. 2
“SOLUTIONS JOURNALISM”
IS GROWING WORLDWIDE:
“CAN WE FIX IT? YES WE
CAN!” P. 3
CAN TRUST IN THE NEWS BE
REPAIRED? P. 4
AVANT-GARDE
TECHNOLOGIES GO
MAINSTREAM: IMMERSIVE
TV, 360, VR...
YOU “WEAR IT” P. 4
activity, according to a study
by Columbia University
Journalism School’s Tow
Center issued just a few days
before the IJF 2017.
The influence of social
platforms
is
shaping
journalism itself. They offer
incentives for types of
content, (live video) or by
dictating publisher activity
through design standards
and have thus become
explicitly editorial.
Furthermore the “ fake news”
revelations of the 2016 US
election have forced social
platforms to take greater
responsibility for publishing
decisions.
But
there
has
been
pushback: while the study
reports that platforms rely
on algorithms to sort and
target content, “they have
not wanted to invest in
human editing to both avoid
cost and the perception that
humans would be biased”.
The Festival showed how
the platform companies, led
by Facebook and Google,
have been proactive in
starting initiatives focused
on improving the news
environment and issues of
news literacy.
News organizations are
thus at a crossroads: either
maintain smaller audiences
but complete control over
brand, audience, and data?
Or cede control over user
data and advertising in
exchange for significant
audience growth offered by
the platforms?
The main sponsors of the
2017 event were Facebook,
Google, Amazon and Eni.
Other sponsors and partners
included the European
Union, the Umbria Region,
The Italian Government,
The Italian State Railways,
The City of Perugia, The
Chamber of Commerce,
Nestlé and Sky.
Dennis Redmont,
Senior Executive Advisor,
Edelman
@DennisRedmont
Fact-checkers
at
ABC
News,
FactCheck.org, the Associated Press,
Snopes and Politifact will be using
a tool created by Facebook to help
evaluate the truthfulness of stories
that have been flagged as fake news.
Claire Wardle, who is leading strategy
and research for First Draft (dedicated
to improving skills and standards
in the reporting and sharing of
information that emerges online) says
that the term “fake news” is unhelpful
because this is about more than news,
it’s about the entire information
ecosystem which is composed by
three elements: the different types of
content that are being created and
shared, the motivations of those who
create this content and the ways this
content is being disseminated.
Last November, BuzzFeed News
identified more than 100 proTrump websites being run from a
single town in the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia. As a result,
this strange hub of pro-Trump sites
in the former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia played a significant role
in propagating the kind of false and
misleading content of hyperpartisan
Facebook pages. These sites open a
window into the economic incentives
behind producing misinformation
specifically
for
the
wealthiest
advertising markets and specifically
for Facebook.
In a keynote speech Adam Mosseri
— vice president of product for News
Feed at Facebook — highlighted
several initiatives the social network
was taking to address this problem.
“We’ve seen overall that false news has
decreased on Facebook” Mosseri said.
What Zuckerberg initially framed as
a trivial issue is being countered with
measures aimed at curbing financial
incentives for fake news producers:
“educational” messages to help
users spot fakes and a (soon to be
paid) collaboration with third-party
fact-checkers to better identify and
demote hoaxes on News Feed.
It is not clear if any of this is actually
working. More than three months into
the fact-checking effort, the company
has not shared any data and claims
not to have a precise gauge for it
2
either. Mosseri was clear, however, that
“false” news is now an important issue
for Facebook. This is not just because
of the fines threatened by legislation
like the one just approved by Angela
Merkel’s cabinet in Germany.
“We don’t want false news on our
platform,” Mosseri said, because “it’s
bad for people, it’s at odds with our
mission and it’s bad for our business.
Eroding trust in Facebook over the
long run is going to be really bad for
us as an advertising business.”
Suggestions for combatting this
epidemic that emerged at the festival
included:
1- Early detection
2- Cut off economic incentives
3- Build products which trigger alerts
4- Encourage Facebook to introduce
news flags to identify fake content
Everybody can play a crucial part in
this ecosystem of misinformation and
everybody has to take responsibility
for independently checking what we
see online and journalists must check
a piece of news before they publish it.
Additionally,
the
Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and
Development’s education (OECD)
says that children should be taught in
schools how to spot fake news.
Andreas Schleicher, the thinkthank’s
director, said the ability to distinguish
fact from fiction was essential in
the modern age and teachers were
well placed to provide guidance.
The strongest antibody against fake
news could, however, grow out of the
technology platforms and the media
newsrooms, in the pews of the (old)
school.
Link to the panels:
“Fake news” and the misinformation
ecosystem
How News Feed works
Stop worrying about fake news. What
comes next will be much worse
A field guide to Fake News
Crisis management and reputation
Fake news, real damage
“Solutions
Journalism”
is
growing worldwide: “Can we
fix it? Yes we can!”
“Solutions Journalism” is booming
worldwide, as demand increases for
stories about people or companies
trying to successfully solve a problem.
This offers enormous opportunities for
both communities and corporations.
It is not a “ heroes story” or celebrative,
or “think tank” style, but how someone
or some group is trying to solve a
problem, with the evidence of results.
It allows a solution-oriented framing
of news, with frequent use of datasets
to provide systemic overview and
context.
Companies or the media: where do readers
get their news from?
- The New York Times turned a “bad news” AIDS
disaster story into a positive magazine article on
“how to solve the world’s AIDS problems”, focusing
on the success of generic drugs for fighting AIDS in
Brazil, thanks to a trailblazing program.
- Radio station WNYC (a public broadcaster) showed
how the German prison system’s reeducation
methods provided some alternatives to the US
prison system.
- De Correspondent on why we would give Free
money to everyone
- The Economist on How to manage the Migrant
Crisis
- Ulrike Haagerup, Director of the Danish
Broadcasting Corp is leaving his post to found a
”Constructive Institute” (He says: “The bias of the press
is a preference for the negative” and thus creates a
“fed-up and an apathy prone public”.)
With the emergence of new digital market attention
and the surge of large amounts of information,
companies are feeling the need to play a different
role in this ecosystem of communication.
Normal companies are changing, evolving into
media companies. They could not survive nowadays
by focusing exclusively on their products. One-way
advertisement no longer claims to be effective in
the world of internet and social network. Brands are
thus almost forced to focus on a kind of content that
will create a more direct and engaging relationship
with their users.
Companies are not responsible for the current crisis
of newspapers because, as the experts say, the digital
era allows everybody to be able to find their own
space, you just adapt.
Contemporary consumers are increasingly looking
for products and services that meet ethical
standards, and form a community with common
feelings and shared intent.
The trend towards greater corporate responsibility
seems widespread on a large scale.
Many companies are also funding local projects,
such as block parties or charity football matches.
These are events that do not give great visibility, but
they are creating that sense of community that
companies may have always lacked.
Instead, Journalism can become a feedback
mechanism which helps a society self-correct.
Dozens of examples of “fix-it” journalism are
sprouting, such as “solutions Journalism network”
led by Tina Rosenberg.
Links to the panels:
Engaging the next generation: solutions journalism
as a solution?
How solutions journalism strengthens engagement
and increases accountability
Edelman’s 2016 verified prediction:
Fact-checking, debunking (visual and print)
and the final solution: cutting off the economic
spigot
Link to the panels:
Brand Journalism: news or PR?
News beyond advertising
Companies or the media: where do readers get their
news from?
Consumers want ethics
Sharing to create community
Link to the panel:
How to spot fake news. For school pupils
Fact checking in the age of Trump
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Can trust in the news be repaired?
Link to the panels:
How News Feed works
A trustworthy press is the immune system of
democracy. With Craig Newmark
Role of digital companies in evolution of news
publishing. With Richard Gingras
For the first time, multiple parties are coming
together to form trustworthy alliances. And the
festival served as a launch pad.
At the start of April, a global coalition of tech
leaders, academic institutions, non-profits and
funders, including Facebook, Mozilla and Craigslist
Founder Craig Newmark, announced a 14 million
dollars initiative to combat declining trust in the
news media and advance news literacy (NII). The
coalition includes Edelman and many others such
as Wikipedia, LSE and institutions in Asia, Europe
and Latin America, besides UNESCO. Edelman’s 2016 verified prediction:
Long live the “Trump Bump”, The “Brexit
Break” and the new wave of media junkies!
Link to the panels:
Trump’s America: what did we get wrong?
Pollsters or astrologists? The social role of opinion
polls in politics
Brexit, the EU and the British press
The state of data journalism in post-Brexit Europe
The News Integrity Initiative, which will be
administered by the CUNY Graduate School
of Journalism will unite an initial group of 19
organizations and individuals around the world to
make journalism more informative and help news
consumers understand it better (Facebook Pushes
News Literacy to Combat a Crisis of Trust – Wired,
April 6 2017). It will conduct research, plan events
and undertake projects to help news consumers
understand it better. Among those present at the
festival were Facebook’s Adam Mosseri and Craig
Newmark himself, the European Journalism Center
from the Netherlands, and many others.
Avant-garde technologies go mainstream: immersive TV, 360, VR... You “wear it”
Technology is constantly evolving and journalism
is forced to develop with it. Running away from
technology means to reject a new way of doing
journalism.
Only two years ago, the Go Pro was an innovation.
Few people had one and it was very expensive. Now
more and more people have the camera and costs
have significantly decreased.
2016 has been the year of 360° video and 2017 is
going to turn the same road into a highway. 360°
technologies and Virtual reality in fact represent one
of the frontiers of experimentation for journalism.
Facebook touted its own “Journalism initiative” that
included an outreach campaign to newsrooms
across the United States.
Topmost on the agenda were the obstacles faced
by the group such as the rise of filter bubbles, the
metastasis of hyperpartisan news and other factors,
especially during the American election campaign
in 2016, which caused trust in media to sink to an
all-time low.
The initial idea for NII sprouted after Jeff Jarvis,
director of the Tow - Knight Center of Entrepreneurial
Journalism discussed ways forward with Newmark .
The cameras are easier to use and have the potential
of bringing VR (or Augmented Reality) to consumers
sooner than later.
For several months, this new technology has been
tested by qualified international titles (for example:
Associated Press, CNN, BBC, Reuters and others) and
is spreading to other sectors.
“As a news consumer, like most folks, I want news we
can trust. That means standing up for trustworthy
newsmedia and learning how to spot clickbait and
deceptive news. Newmark said.
With 360° video, users are quickly present where
things happens. It has emotional power.
Many publishers and editors worldwide decided
to invest significant resources in immersive visual
storytelling projects and platforms like Youtube and
especially Facebook, to allow a global audience to
be reached.
While NOT a partner in the initiative, Google Vice
President for news Richard Gingras, speaking of the
development of digital companies in the evolution
of news publishing, reported “ there is no silver
bullet to regain trust”
Developers hope eyewear can replace smartphones
as a primary computing tool. While Facebook’s VR
hardware efforts may be more nascent than those
of some of its rivals, the company began work more
than a year ago on developing applications for social
networking in virtual reality. Demonstrations have
included cartoonish avatars taking VR “selfies” in
Google presented its recent “Fact check”, also
launched in April, which was rolled out across
Google news platforms.
4
360-degree renderings of a real places.
Besides the “wow” effect, there is an editorial future
for these innovations.
Immersive journalism: Geo tools, from interactive
maps to Google Earth
Data journalism: data, graphics and charts, and
Google Trends
Link to the panel:
360° videos and VR: immersive journalism is here to
stay?
Immersive Journalism: Youtube and VR/360
How artificial Intelligence has already
started to impact Journalism Streaming workflows, automating mundane tasks,
crunching more data, digging out insights and
generating additional outputs are just a few of
the megawins that can result from putting smart
machines to work in the service of journalism.
Innovators throughout the news industry are
collaborating with technology companies and
academic researchers to push the envelope in a
number of related areas, affecting all points on the
new value chain from news gathering to production
and distribution.
How the platforms are hooking you
With over 3 billion Google searches a day, how can
journalists use search engines to filter the noise and
reduce searching time?
Google News Lab (a Google team specialized in
supporting and interacting with newsrooms) aimed
to give an answer to this question. It intends to foster
the role of Google tools in the production of news
and empower innovation. Since 1998, Google Search
Refinements have progressively been introduced
to filter websites, domains and file types, making it
easier to target results.
During the IJF 2017, Google media trainer Elisabetta
Tola (journalist and science communicator) taught
journalists Google’s advanced search tools to
conquer the information overload and verify sources.
She showed functionalities of Google Search, besides
on some less-used tools like Google
Scholar (a collection of scholarly
papers helpful in understanding who
is an academic expert in a certain
field), Google Alert (useful to receive
updates when following a specific
issue), Google Images (useful to verify
the authenticity of a picture) and
Google Trends (an index which allows
journalists to compare terms or find
how widely searched they are).
The festival coincided with the publication of major
report in April by the Associated Press executive
Francesco Marconi entitled “the future of augmented
journalism, a guide for the newsroom in the age of
smart machines”.
As noted in 2016 Edelman newsletter, robots are
already writing quarterly stock market results,
She unlocked the potential of two
free tools MyMaps and Google Earth
Pro (offering images, unlike the basic
version) to create maps and videos to
illustrate events of great emotional
impact such as floods, earthquakes
or terrorist attacks. This also helps
illustration of travel routes, reportage,
or even weather maps constructed by
the public by sending their geolocated
images.
The new digital app now makes it possible to enrich
articles with many details, editing every single
point on the map by selecting how many and what
information to provide, and possibly also adding
video or by creating automatically animated paths.
sports bulletins, weather forecasts and even some
crime stories. The Los Angeles Times experimented
with robots writing earthquake stories. AP is providing
customers with 12 times the corporate earnings
stories as before (to over 3,700). Journalists were
thus freed to pursue investigative work and focus
on more complex stories. Text to speech technology
now allows news content to be broadcast with a
synthetic voice.
Link to the panel:
Online security, verification and advanced research
tools. Data and Google trends
On the use of scientific data
5
The future of Sports
The power of sport is maximized when it is
consumed live, in a social environment with
friends and family, and further enhanced
through the engagement possibilities enabled
by technology. This will likely result in media
companies looking to enhance technology
capabilities and technology companies
looking to acquire media rights. Hence, we
expect sports content to aggregate technology
platforms.
A Barclays bank report shows how consumption
of live sport events tends to be “more” social
than viewing scripted shows. As such, we
expect sports content to combine technology
platforms whereas scripted content needs
a technology platform to aggregate the
content.
Sports content on television has increased 160%
over the last decade. Sports content fragmentation
has grown along with scripted content. With hours
of television viewing falling, sports viewership is
dominating viewership.
However this requires a whole new set of skills computational journalists, special technologies
units, etc
Who will pay for this?
Links to the panels:
Collaborating with algorithms
Not just cool graphs: data journalism for investigations
Bots for journalism: where next?
Rethinking algorithms and metrics in the newsroom
The crisis of capitalism. And of democracy?
T
he 11th edition of the
International
Journalism
Festival broke records. Five
days,duringwhichthecityofPerugia
has become the meeting point
(and melting-pot) of thousands
of
journalists,
information
experts and the general public.
The 2017 edition increases
attendees to an estimated 65.000
participants, with over 2.000
accredited journalists; 287 events,
all free of charge in 15 locations in
the center of Perugia; 693 speakers
coming from 44 different countries.
EDELMANEWS
Newsletter a cura
di Edelman Italia
Via Varese 11
20121 - MILANO
Tel. 02.63116.1
Per dialogare con
Edelman:
www.edelman.it
Twitter: @EdelmanItalia
Link to the panel:
Goal! Live Italian football cup semi-final action and
chat
Disability and sport: the lessons of Rio 2016
TV commentary skills from sport to sport
Some social media highlights:
YouTube, 50.000 views on the
Festival’s channel, with 10.000
hours of live streaming and 43.000
global, on demand streaming.
All events were broadcast live.
Twitter: hashtag #ijf17 produced
around 35.000 tweets, coming
from about 11.000 different users
(and 4 continents) and it was one
of the trending topics, during the
Festival, in Italy, United States,
Switzerland, United Kingdom,
Australia and Austria. Almost the
40% of the tweets were created
outside of Italy.
The peak was reached with #ijf17
Saturday, April 8 with 9857 tweets
with 9 events simultaneously.
Facebook: 655.000 global views
of the Festival’s contents, and
175.000 between interactions,
clicks, comments and shares.
15 live videos in 5 days. More
than
190.000
video
views,
157.000 views with live video.
Instagram: 2.079 shared pictures
with hashtag #ijf17.
The 2018 edition will be held in
Perugia from April 11 to April 15.
Perugia, Italy | 5-9 april 2017 | XI edition
www.journalismfestival.com
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