While We Weren’t Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks

The NYT reporting: 

While Silicon Valley was shunning editing and curation done by humans, and instead relying on computers to spot and disseminate news, Snapchat began hiring producers and reporters to assemble clips into in-depth pieces.The company calls these Live Stories, and they have been transformative, unlike any other news presentation you can find online. Every day, Snapchat offers one or several stories about big and small events happening in the world, including football games, awards shows and serious news.

For instance, this summer, while the rest of the media were engulfed by Hurricane Trump, Snapchat’s news team spent days following the devastating floods in Louisiana. That in itself was unusual, but Snap’s presentation was also groundbreaking: Rather than showing the overhead shots or anchor stand-ups that are conventional on TV news, Snapchat offered video from inside people’s houses, from shelters, from schools. It mixed the macrostory of an impending natural disaster and the government’s response to it with the microtragedies of personal loss, and even the lighter moments of humor and boredom in between.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/technology/while-we-werent-looking-snapchat-revolutionized-social-networks.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_tu_20161202&nl=bits&nl_art=1&nlid=59435537&ref=headline&te=1

New Report Looks at Optimal Hashtag Use on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Social Media Today reporting:
The commonly stated best practice for hashtags on Twitter has been two, with research showing that engagement drops significantly once any more than two hashtags are used, on average.
...The commonly stated best practice for hashtags on Twitter has been two, with research showing that engagement drops significantly once any more than two hashtags are used, on average.
...TrackMaven found that nine hashtags is the optimal amount for boosting engagement on the platform...

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/new-report-looks-optimal-hashtag-use-twitter-instagram-and-facebook?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20Weekly%20Roundup:%20Social%20Media%20Today%2010-22-2016&utm_term=Social%20Media%20Today%20Weekender

Don't miss: Five key insights into online video consumption habits

the mediabriefing reporting:

The Online Video Forecasts claim that just over half (52.7 percent) of all video will be consumed on mobile devices in 2016, while Ooyala's latest Global Video Index demonstrated that 46 percent of all video plays in Q4 2015 were on mobile devices.And Statista predictions demonstrate that the number of people in the US who are consuming video on mobile devices is set to increase still further in the US alone, let alone the emerging markets:

https://www.themediabriefing.com/article/don-t-miss-key-insights-into-newspaper-subscription-models-in-the-us

Facebook, Twitter and the death of the link

Fortune reporting:
...Facebook’s “Instant Articles” and Twitter’s new Moments feature seem to be accelerating this phenomenon, for better or worse. The whole point of Facebook’s Instant Articles project, in which it has formed partnerships with publishers like the New York Times, is that the content from those publishers exists completely inside Facebook’s mobile app. It’s consumed there, and shared there—there’s no link to an external site because it’s unnecessary...
So where is the downside? The risk is that since news consumption occurs entirely inside Facebook, the social network becomes thedefault source of news for large numbers of people, and they eventually stop associating that news with the outlet that actually created it. There’s already some evidence that this is happening...
http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/death-of-the-link/

The New York Times builds out digital rewrite team

politicomedia reporting:

The New York Times has created a new newsroom unit to tackle the types of stories that are going viral on the web.Headed up by Patrick LaForge, the "Express Team" "will cover news that readers are searching for and talking about online, but also push that news forward rather than just repackaging it for clicks," according to a Tuesday afternoon staff memo signed by executive editor Dean Baquet, deputy executive editor Susan Chira, editor for innovation and strategy Kinsey Wilson, and assistant editor Clifford Levy."This new team will quickly and smartly weigh in on the issues and questions that are attracting attention across the day and around the world," they wrote.The move comes as the Times' is becoming ever more aggressive about scaling its digital audience, which is becoming more important to revenue growth...

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/10/8579538/new-york-times-builds-out-digital-rewrite-team?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=0139128e4d-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-0139128e4d-384988165

How Millennials Get News: Inside the habits of America’s first digital generation

API reporting:

Millennials consume news and information in strikingly different ways than previous generations, and their paths to discovery are more nuanced and varied than some may have imagined, according to the new study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

How Millennials get news

Percent of Millennials who…
Say keeping up with the news is at least somewhat important to them	85%
Get news daily	69%
Regularly follow five or more "hard news" topics	45%
Usually see diverse opinions through social media	86%
Pay for at least one news-specific service, app, or digital subscription	40%

MEDIA INSIGHT PROJECT

The data also suggest that social networks are exposing Millennials to more news than they were initially seeking. Overall, just 47 percent who use Facebook say that getting news is a main motivation for visiting, but it has become one of the significant activities they engage in once they are there. Fully 88 percent of Millennials get news from Facebook regularly, for instance, and more than half of them do so daily...

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-news/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=0f6847b4f6-Need_to_Know_May_22_20155_22_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-0f6847b4f6-31701933

CJR reporting:

TEN MONTHS AGO, the Chicago Tribune simultaneously launched two accounts on Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform: one showcasing the work of the paper’s staff photographers and another highlighting old photos from the basement archives.
In less than a year, the staff photography account has attracted a respectable 4,496 followers. But it is the vintage account—the brainchild of Robin Daughtridge, the paper’s director of photography—that has been the surprise hit, with nearly 25,000 followers.Daughtridge and photo editor Marianne Mather post up to eight photos a day, little black-and-white flashbacks from the massive archives of the Tribune Tower. Recent photos show morning commuters on an express bus in 1981, two women at North Avenue Beach in 1960, and a late-career Babe Ruth in his Boston Braves uniform, sitting in the Wrigley Field dugout in 1935...http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/instagram_chicago_illinois_news.php

Periscope Could Make Twitter an Even More Powerful News Source

SocialTimes reporting:

Through partnerships with companies like Dataminr, Twitter has been informing the mainstream news cycle directly. Twitter has also informed the cycle indirectly by positioning itself as a place to see the news before it’s news, as was the case with the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Periscope has the potential to add live video content to Twitter, which could radically change breaking news. Mainstream sources already rely on Twitter for breaking news, and now they could begin to rely on what The Next Web calls “Next level Twitter.” Next Web reporter Owen Williams watched the aftermath of an explosion in New York City on Periscope:

It’s unprecedented to get this kind of footage seconds after an event occurs, even before first responders arrived. As I watched the drama unfold in New York, streamers were replying to questions about what they could see and were experiencing.

He notes that Periscope removes the friction associated with live video...

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/periscope-could-make-twitter-an-even-more-powerful-news-source/617827

Are viral traffic’s days numbered?

digiday reporting:

...It may seem like the Internet was awash in posts about #thedress and, for that matter, runaway llamas, as of late. But a confluence of factors, from viewability to changing Facebook algorithms to falling CPMs, are making the economics of this kind of viral strategy a bit more complicated.
Google and Facebook have changed their formulas to deemphasize junky traffic in search results and in users’ news feeds. Facebook, for its part, said it would give more weight to stories that readers spend more time with and share more. Those changes forced Yahoo to tighten up its guidelines after traffic to its Associated Content community publishing business plunged and has sought to refashion itself as a premium publisher. Similarly, Demand Media, the onetime tech darling that scaled an audience based on so-called expert posts like “How to Boil an Egg” and “How to do Laundry,” has had to change its editorial formula.Gawker, which was once at the forefront of directly incentivizing writers based on their traffic, announced recently that it would move away from the bonus system that helped put it on the map and that going forward, bonuses would be decided subjectively by a “Politburo” consisting of Craggs and other editors. Other major publishers including Vox, BuzzFeed and Forbes are eschewing traffic-based bonuses or looking at engagement metrics that measure posts by the time and attention readers give them over mere clicks.

The end of the pageview era
Underlying all these changes is a shift in how digital media is being bought and sold. The Internet is drowning in pageviews and click-through rates have plummeted, which has led publishers to cram their sites with evermore pageviews and load them up with display ads, the vast majority of which will be ignored. Advertisers are increasingly aware that a significant portion of traffic is fake, generated by bots, and that a vast number of ads aren’t being seen by humans. But a backlash is brewing. The industry has set a standard that says at least half of an ad must be in view for at least one second, but Unilever and its agency GroupM have gone beyond that...http://digiday.com/publishers/viral-traffics-days-numbered/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=9b6eccbbcc-Need_to_Know_March_9_20153_9_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-9b6eccbbcc-31701933

Welcome to ‘Everyware’ computing

Newsosaur/Ken Doctor reporting
...The phenomenon is known variously as Ambient Computing, Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing or – my personal favorite – Everyware. So, let’s go with that...But ubiquitous computing seems likely to have major impact on the media business, because it will all but eliminate the intermediary relationship that media companies require to build the audiences they traditionally have sold to advertisers. 

Assuming Everyware materializes as envisioned by Silicon Valley’s savants, it spontaneously will deliver targeted information and entertainment, while at the same time enabling marketers to maintain persistent, direct and dynamic one-to-one relationships with individual consumers. 

In that event, what roles will be left to gate-keeping editors and the media companies that employ them? Publishers and broadcasters need to start focusing on this, so here are the trends to watch: 

http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2015/02/welcome-to-everyware-computing.html

Emily Bell: Social networks and journalists need to work together

gigaom reporting:

Rise of the tabloid web

...As Bell points out, most newsrooms — even the slow-moving, traditionally-focused ones like the New York Times — have come to realize that they need to understand and take advantage of the social sharing that platforms like Facebook provide, because that is how content works now. Everyone wants to “go viral.” In a sense, the web is encouraging everyone to think like the editor of a tabloid newspaper like the Daily Mirror. What do readers want and how can we give it to them as quickly as possible?

The problem — as Bell outlined in a similar lecture last year at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — is that journalists and media companiesno longer have any control whatsoever over what happens to their content once they publish it. Proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter and Google are now the power brokers who determine who sees your story and when, and their decisions are made for reasons that may have nothing to do with the journalistic quality of your content....

The bottom line, Bell says, is that journalists and technology companies or social platforms need to work together to figure out how to handle the atomized, networked and democratized media environment we all find ourselves in. It’s not enough for Facebook or Google to say they aren’t journalistic organizations and therefore they don’t have a duty to consider things like free speech — they are functioning as journalistic tools, and they have a larger responsibility to society.

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/emily-bell-social-networks-and-journalists-need-to-work-together/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=5a0a2bfcf0-c:mdad:02-02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-5a0a2bfcf0-99152541

5 charts that show how social media rules publishing

digiday reporting:
The New York Times may deny that it’s playing the BuzzFeed game, but there’s no getting around the fact that with the homepage declining in importance as a source of publishers’ traffic, the pressure to use social media to find readers has never been greater...
This shift is happening as their employers are becoming increasingly dependent on social media for traffic. In September 2013, the eight biggest social referrers drove 16.4 percent of traffic to publishers’ sites, according to Shareaholic, which measured traffic across more than 200 sites of varying audience sizes. A year later, that number had nearly doubled, to 29.5 percent. Facebook is in a class all its own: It drove more than 22 percent of referrals to publishers, with Pinterest a distant second....
The sites that are winning on Facebook are digital-native, viral sites, led by The Huffington Post, which had more than 42 million total likes, shares and comments in December...
http://digiday.com/publishers/5-charts-show-social-media-rules-publishers/

Don’t try too hard to please Twitter — and other lessons from The New York Times’ social media desk

NiemanLab reporting: The past year brought major changes to The New York Times. The social media desk’s editors joined a new department, Audience Development. Our team gained new resources as we combined efforts with colleagues who previously ran the Times’ Facebook page on the business side of the company, formalizing a relationship that had been more casual. Our desk now works alongside teams focused on search engine optimization, community management, newsroom analytics, and growth. We focus on setting standards for the distribution of Times journalism to broader audiences...
On a daily basis we publish many articles that need an alternative approach to attract readers that might come to us from social media. But there are also a significant number of instances where we shouldn’t try too hard to write a great tweet when other skilled journalists in our newsroom have already written one in the form of a headline. We’ve learned that lesson on our team, and also work to communicate it to desks around the newsroom that are more actively staffing their own Twitter accounts.

Photographs and other visuals all but took over Twitter’s main stream in 2014. It became not uncommon to see news organizations and even some journalists embed a photo in nearly every tweet. We expanded our use of visuals on @NYTimes, but in a way that served Times journalism and held us to our high standards for photojournalism...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/01/dont-try-too-hard-to-please-twitter-and-other-lessons-from-the-new-york-times-social-media-desk/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=61770be421-Need_to_Know_January_23_20151_23_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-61770be421-31701933

Complicating the network: The year in social media research

NiemanLab reporting:
“The battle for ‘Trayvon Martin': Mapping a media controversy online and off-line”: From the MIT Center for Civic Media, published in First Monday. By Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman.
“The Ethics of Web Analytics: Implications of using audience metrics in news construction”: From Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Missouri School of Journalism, published in Digital Journalism. By Edson C. Tandoc Jr. and Ryan J. Thomas.
“Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption”: From Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford and Microsoft Research. By Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao......
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/complicating-the-network-the-year-in-social-media-research/  

Digital Publishing: To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Editor&Publisher reporting:
...

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter.

According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the
company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new
media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the
importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18
times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a
tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.”
Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets.
While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes.
So should it really be a requirement, in today’s digital environment, for reporters and editors to be on Twitter? Yes, according to Steve Buttry, formerly the digital transformation editor for Digital First Media, now Lamar Visiting Scholar at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, Buttry called out Baquet in a blog post, making the case that journalists that choose not to be active on Twitter “choose to remain or fall behind.”

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter. According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18 times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.” Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets. While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes. - See more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-#sthash.K5MqyV7e.dpuf

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter. According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18 times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.” Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets. While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes. - See more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-#sthash.K5MqyV7e.dpuf

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-

Changes in social media usage

ofcom reporting:

Not all aspects of the internet are retaining their appeal for the UK. The proportion of online adults in this country accessing social networks each week fell from 65% in September 2013 to 56% in October 2014. This was the steepest fall of any of the countries surveyed.

One factor behind the decline may be the rise of other social media which do not involve networks of connections, such as online video sites and instant messaging.

Social network use also fell in the USA, Japan and China. However, it is still increasing in some other countries - including Italy, which is now the leading country for social networking, with three quarters of Italians using such sites at least once a week.

Weekly access to social networks

Despite their decline in the UK, social networks remain the most popular internet activity for smartphone users. Among all those who access the internet on their phone in the UK, 64% use social networks, ahead of the next most popular activity of reading online news (44%).

http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2014/icmr-2014/

Czech Study: Social Media as a News Source?

Reuters Institute reporting:

Journalists often claim that social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, have become important news sources, but have they? Researchers from Charles University in Prague studied Czech media to establish to what extent traditional journalistic methods are being replaced by social media platforms. They found that, despite the growing use of digital sources, their impact on mainstream news is still relatively low.

Most previous studies into social media and news have been conducted in Western Europe and the United States. Results have so far been conflicting. The Czech study, by thePolCoRe group at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, aimed to provide a new perspective. Instead of looking at the impact of social media during particular news events, the researchers took a different approach. Václav Štětka, the PolCoRe group leader said: “We deliberately selected a period where no elections or any known significant events took place. Our data then better reflects how Czech media works under natural circumstances.”,,,

The analysis also showed that social media are used as a source – of both text and pictorial information – in topics such as sport, celebrities or crime – so-called ‘soft news’. This applies to all examined media, except for the financial newspaper Hospodářské noviny and the public radio station Český rozhlas, which used social media as a source of more serious, up-to-date news (‘hard news’).

Researchers also looked at how the selected media worked with social media information. They demonstrated this by noting which individuals were quoted from Facebook or Twitter (and YouTube, to a negligible extent): sportsmen (34% of articles mentioning social media as a source), followed by “common people” (24%), celebrities (15,5%), and politicians (15,2%).

The rather high percentage of “vox populi” could indicate that media are more open to non-elite voices. However, it has to be pointed out that “common citizens” were quoted only in connection with criminal topics and did not get any chance to comment on political or economic topics.

“The research has shown that the role of social media as a source of information for Czech media is still rather peripheral; it has also indicated that social media contribute to the trend of tabloidization of print, since they are hardly ever used as a source of hard news,” said Václav Štětka and Radim Hladík...

http://en.ejo.ch/9651/digital_news/twitter-facebook-news-sources

Unsatisfied US journalists believe journalism is heading in the wrong direction

theguardian reporting:
US journalists, who are less satisfied with their work and have less autonomy than previously, believe journalism is headed in the wrong direction.
These are the initial findings of a survey of conducted by the Indiana university journalism school, "The American journalist in the digital age."
Compared to a similar study in 2002, there are notable changes in attitude among reporters and editors, along with changes in daily work methods.
So what's wrong with the direction? When asked about the "most important problem facing journalism today," the respondents mentioned the following issues: declining profits (mentioned by 20.4%); threats to profession from online media (11.4%); job cuts and downsizing (11.3%); the need for a new business model and funding structure (10.8%); and the tendency towards hasty reporting (9.9%).
The journalists now rely heavily on social media to check for breaking news and to monitor what other news organisations are doing.
Most see this as a positive trend, agreeing that social media promotes them and their work, keeps them more engaged with their audiences and leads to faster reporting.
Far fewer say that social media has decreased their workload, improved their productivity, allowed them to cover more news or enhanced their credibility.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/may/12/us-press-publishing-usa

Why we see journalists as conversation leaders and readers as expert contributors

At De Correspondent, we owe our very existence to our members, since we launched our Dutch ad-free journalism platform after raising a total of 1.7 million dollars with a world record breaking crowd-funding campaign. We encourage our correspondents — who all have their own niche — to tell the stories that they feel are important, instead of just following the hype cycle of the news.

By doing this, we try to go from ‘news’ to ‘new’.

These ‘new’ insights do not only come from our correspondents setting their own news agenda. No, lots of insights are shared with us by our members. This makes sense, since a thousand school teachers who read De Correspondent together know more than just one Education correspondent.

And we’re just getting started. Here’s how we’re trying to turn our correspondents into conversation leaders and our members into expert contributors.

1. We don’t call them ‘comments’, we prefer ‘contributions’

Instead of asking for their opinions, we ask our readers to share their ‘experience and knowledge’. And we don’t say ‘comments’, we prefer ‘contributions.’ This may seem like a minor detail, but the first step to great reader contributions is an articulation of your expectations.

for more advise see 

https://medium.com/de-correspondent/8c234ff5bc53

Who cares if it’s true? Modern-day newsrooms reconsider their values

CJR reporting:
...

BuzzFeed is no scrappy little start-up anymore. It’s a big, profitable, influential news organization. The viral videos it publishes—generally without vetting—occasionally turn out to be hoaxes, the kind of mistake that delights old print curmudgeons eager to assert their ethical superiority. But as BuzzFeed continues to grow—four new employees checked in at the front desk in the 10 minutes I spent waiting there one morning—they’re not just adding brilliant headline writers and producers who get the gestalt of cat lovers. BuzzFeed has decided it’s no longer good enough to fix errors after publication, at least not on its most popular posts. They’ve decided it makes good journalism and business sense to assure readers that their posts are true, so BuzzFeed is embracing the ultimate symbol of the overstuffed print newsrooms of the pre-digital past. BuzzFeed is hiring copy editors.

President Bar

For nearly two decades, a culture war has divided journalists. The gap seemed mostly generational, but it always boiled down to a battle over the very purpose of what we do. All the dismissive sniping and straight-out antagonism between old-school defenders of the print craft and the young digital brains propelling start-ups came down to a debate over values: The old guard argued that they were driven by the quest for truth, and by their sense of what citizens need to know to be informed participants in democracy. Reporting was all about locking down the facts and presenting them to readers, who would know best how to take advantage of the light we shined. Digital journalists countered that their way was more honest and democratic—and quicker. If that meant presenting stories before they’d been thoroughly vetted, that was okay, because the internet would correct itself. Truth would emerge through open trial and error.
With the collapse of old business models, the debate over values turned into a death match. Print chauvinists still muster mock horror when a few news sites run with wholly unconfirmed reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s uncle, apparently fallen from favor, was stripped, caged and eaten by 120 ravenous dogs. And more than a few digital evangelists find a proud identity in the distance they keep from stodgy, superfluous, layered editing structures that persist at many newspapers and magazines.
But consider a new possibility: What if conciliation is at hand?...
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/who_cares_if_its_true.php?page=all 

BuzzFeed is no scrappy little start-up anymore. It’s a big, profitable, influential news organization. The viral videos it publishes—generally without vetting—occasionally turn out to be hoaxes, the kind of mistake that delights old print curmudgeons eager to assert their ethical superiority. But as BuzzFeed continues to grow—four new employees checked in at the front desk in the 10 minutes I spent waiting there one morning—they’re not just adding brilliant headline writers and producers who get the gestalt of cat lovers. BuzzFeed has decided it’s no longer good enough to fix errors after publication, at least not on its most popular posts. They’ve decided it makes good journalism and business sense to assure readers that their posts are true, so BuzzFeed is embracing the ultimate symbol of the overstuffed print newsrooms of the pre-digital past. BuzzFeed is hiring copy editors. For nearly two decades, a culture war has divided journalists. The gap seemed mostly generational, but it always boiled down to a battle over the very purpose of what we do. All the dismissive sniping and straight-out antagonism between old-school defenders of the print craft and the young digital brains propelling start-ups came down to a debate over values: The old guard argued that they were driven by the quest for truth, and by their sense of what citizens need to know to be informed participants in democracy. Reporting was all about locking down the facts and presenting them to readers, who would know best how to take advantage of the light we shined. Digital journalists countered that their way was more honest and democratic—and quicker. If that meant presenting stories before they’d been thoroughly vetted, that was okay, because the internet would correct itself. Truth would emerge through open trial and error. With the collapse of old business models, the debate over values turned into a death match. Print chauvinists still muster mock horror when a few news sites run with wholly unconfirmed reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s uncle, apparently fallen from favor, was stripped, caged and eaten by 120 ravenous dogs. And more than a few digital evangelists find a proud identity in the distance they keep from stodgy, superfluous, layered editing structures that persist at many newspapers and magazines. But consider a new possibility: What if conciliation is at hand? - See more at: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/who_cares_if_its_true.php?page=all#sthash.IbcuNo4O.dpuf

BuzzFeed is no scrappy little start-up anymore. It’s a big, profitable, influential news organization. The viral videos it publishes—generally without vetting—occasionally turn out to be hoaxes, the kind of mistake that delights old print curmudgeons eager to assert their ethical superiority. But as BuzzFeed continues to grow—four new employees checked in at the front desk in the 10 minutes I spent waiting there one morning—they’re not just adding brilliant headline writers and producers who get the gestalt of cat lovers. BuzzFeed has decided it’s no longer good enough to fix errors after publication, at least not on its most popular posts. They’ve decided it makes good journalism and business sense to assure readers that their posts are true, so BuzzFeed is embracing the ultimate symbol of the overstuffed print newsrooms of the pre-digital past. BuzzFeed is hiring copy editors. For nearly two decades, a culture war has divided journalists. The gap seemed mostly generational, but it always boiled down to a battle over the very purpose of what we do. All the dismissive sniping and straight-out antagonism between old-school defenders of the print craft and the young digital brains propelling start-ups came down to a debate over values: The old guard argued that they were driven by the quest for truth, and by their sense of what citizens need to know to be informed participants in democracy. Reporting was all about locking down the facts and presenting them to readers, who would know best how to take advantage of the light we shined. Digital journalists countered that their way was more honest and democratic—and quicker. If that meant presenting stories before they’d been thoroughly vetted, that was okay, because the internet would correct itself. Truth would emerge through open trial and error. With the collapse of old business models, the debate over values turned into a death match. Print chauvinists still muster mock horror when a few news sites run with wholly unconfirmed reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s uncle, apparently fallen from favor, was stripped, caged and eaten by 120 ravenous dogs. And more than a few digital evangelists find a proud identity in the distance they keep from stodgy, superfluous, layered editing structures that persist at many newspapers and magazines. But consider a new possibility: What if conciliation is at hand? - See more at: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/who_cares_if_its_true.php?page=all#sthash.IbcuNo4O.dpuf