IFTF: It Doesn't Have to Happen Here: Saving Our Democracy

It's only 0635 MST and my brain is already full for the day. I'll have to come back to this summary of a recent "convening" at the Institute for the Future. The meeting appears to have identified several problems arising from social media and current journalism practices, and to have produced surprisingly (to me) concrete ways of addressing those problems. IFTF: It Doesn't Have to Happen Here: Saving Our Democracy:

"As a rule, journalists are not accustomed to fighting back against threats in a unified way. Story exclusivity is important to an individual journalist’s livelihood, and, as a group, they’ve had little reason to share information with competing journalists."

"Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are de-facto publishers, but they don’t want to be. Editorial curation is expensive...What’s needed, said Aviv Ovadya of Media Window, is a layer that displays credibility scores for online news."

"Current funding models for journalism consider readers to be eyeballs for advertisers, and so stories are designed to maximize clicks... novelist William Gibson’s 2002 description of the typical media consumer as a “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism… that can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”"

Oops, they just described me. It's hard enough to read and excerpt passages of interest from online news, let alone re-state it or create a summary analysis. For example, consider this post :)

"But, said David Bornstein, a New York Times columnist and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, stories can be written that create a sense of outrage and a sense of self-efficacy. The secret is to stop writing ”negative” or “positive” stories, and instead write specifically about how problems are being solved, which has the effect of engaging people."