Overview: Content Strategy

open-sourcing the tools we created to do Documenting Hate... writing a guide that will let any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations... Documenting Hate came shortly after Election Day 2016, in response to a widely reported uptick in hate incidents... we decided to ask people across the country to tell us their stories ... organized a col…

many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

three documents from Europe about regulating the net:.... I see danger for the net and its freedoms posed by corporate protectionism and a rising moral panic about technology... Articles 11 & 13: Protectionism gone mad... Article 11 link tax... likely cover many of the snippets shown ... to give you an idea of what they lead to….No exceptions are …

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization... With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site.…

In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill ... Data voids may be relatively easy to diagnose, but they are very difficult to fix... cannot be achieved by removing problematic content... W…

every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld... the next great digital platform...We will interact with it, manipulate it, and experience it like we do the real world... Eventually we’ll be able to search physical space as we might search a text... hyperl…

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee... final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.... in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions.

many of the initial conclusions ...about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans …

Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.

Stories are a cultural universal — there isn’t a single country... that isn’t steeped in stories and storytelling. If something is universal, there’s a good chance it’s the product of evolution, not culture... stories, despite all their variety, contain some common essence ... Think of the structure as a bony skeleton that we rarely notice…stories…

Take the Pro-Truth Pledge to encourage politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors and protect facts and civility. ... Pledge-takers are held accountable through crowd-sourcing the truth.. volunteers who evaluate whether public figures violate the pledge by sharing misinformation.... this peer-reviewed article... Publ…

“persuasive” cartography: ​more than 800 ​ maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs... rather than to communicate geographic information... a variety of persuasive tools ​, including​ allegorical, satirical and pictorial mapping; selective inclusion; unusual use of projections, color, graphics and text; and intentional deception...…

Tour Creator... easily allows anyone to create interactive content in Virtual Reality... Users simply search across Google Street View for their desired locations — or upload their own 360-degree photos — and easily stitch that content together to form “scenes” to which they can add various interactive elements

Bezos and his team ... removed PowerPoint ... Instead, they distribute six-page narrative-based memos, that all attendees read in silence at the start of each meeting... "Reports should be distributed, presentations should be presented." ... if a report primarily conveys information, then stories produce an experience... facts and stories can be …

intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness... crucial for learning... difficult to foster... a virtue worth striving for... entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning ...actively curious about your blind spots... It’s about asking: What am I missing here? our reali…

On one hand, consumers have short attention spans, and on the other, studies have shown that longer video can perform better... first consider the goal of the campaign.... Determining performance on marketing-based goals can be a bit complicated to pin down... If site perusal is your goal, short video is best... Why produce a long video when you…

News... is a standardized nonfiction literary form and only one of the many kinds of a journalistic output.... if the context of what we called “news” for nearly two centuries has radically altered, is news still functioning as it should?... The invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s allowed ... bursts of information in ... messages, wh…

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand... seen at all levels of a company... if you already know the answer... tend to underestimate the difficulty of the question or the problem... become so immersed in t…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong because they are misinformed, that if they knew what you knew, they would change their minds to match yours... maybe WE are the ones who are wrong. We never go into the debate hoping to be enlightened, only to crush our opponents... When confronted with people who disagree, you te…

the Oxford Circus panic ... was amplified by social media.... Fear can be transmitted digitally as easily as it can physically—and that’s a problem because digital technologies reach everyone.... the English-speaking world is in the middle of a fear pandemic... Cognitive biases leave us ill-equipped ... Amygdala hijacks and warped media business m…

What is data journalism? What is it for? What might it do? What opportunities and limitations does it present? Who and what is involved in making and making sense of it?

One of the most effective ways to change people’s minds is to put your argument into ... a story — but not just any story. The most persuasive narratives are those that transport us. Once departed from normal reality into the imagined world of a story, we become highly susceptible to belief and attitude change.... learn from psychologist Melanie C…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Every government has bureaucrats, who are by nature unelected. The EU, with about 33,000 civil servants, is dwarfed by the British ... 400,000. ... many senior ones are appointed rather than elected; yet this, too, is true of all governments.... the 28 commissioners ... are nominated by member countries and approved by the European Parliament, whi…

Latest on the K4P Medium Publication

The tension between literalism and contextualism is one fact-checkers face every day... Swing too far towards literalism and you’re a bone-headed bean counter. Get too contextual and you’re taking wild leaps of interpretation — something fact-checking was explicitly set up to avoid... This interpretative license can be heavily colored by personal …

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…