The 97th Block: Stranger than fiction
The hyper-truth, that is.
This week…
The Toronto Zoo’s immersive multimedia nightwalk, Terra Lumina, imagines a world in 2099 where humans and nature live in harmony. Ah, storytelling. More on that below.
Here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
In the Ukraine conflict, fake fact-checks are being used to spread disinformation
Craig Silverman and Jeff Kao for ProPublica:
Russian officials executed a media crackdown culminating in a new law that forbids outlets in the country from publishing anything that deviates from the official stance on the war, while blocking Russians’ access to Facebook and the BBC, among other outlets and platforms.
Media outlets around the world have responded to the onslaught of lies and misinformation by fact-checking and debunking content and claims. The fake fact-check videos capitalize on these efforts to give Russian-speaking viewers the idea that Ukrainians are widely and deliberately circulating false claims about Russian airstrikes and military losses. Transforming debunking into disinformation is a relatively new tactic, one that has not been previously documented during the current conflict.
Only 1% unexpected.
Sounds like a well-trained liar: Journalists lose some credibility by calling themselves storytellers
Sarah Scire for Nieman Lab:
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati found that roughly 80% of the U.S.-based Twitter biographies that included “storyteller” belonged to journalists or former journalists, including reporters at The New York Times, BBC, CBS News, Al Jazeera, CBC News, the Associated Press, Fox News, NBC News, Washington Post, and several local television news affiliates. (Overall, most of the journalists using the “storyteller” identifier in their bio have an affiliation, either past or present, with television news.) The study’s authors — Brian Calfano, Jeffrey Layne Blevins, and Alexis Straka — also pointed to examples of “storytelling” in journalism classes and programs at universities in the United States.
“It’s a term meant to reflect the very real and creative process journalists go through in relating information to the public,” Calfano said. Its widespread use seems to “assume the public views the ‘storyteller’ label as a title or attribute deserving public trust and respect,” as the study notes. But — do they? Turns out the answer is, emphatically, no.
Well, well, well.
Do journalists need to be brands? ($)
Elizabeth Spiers on Medium:
This week’s intra-mural media kerfluffle revolves around backlash to the idea that journalists need to be brands themselves — apart from the institutions they work for. It was precipitated by an article in Insider about The New York Times and retention problems potentially caused by the Times’ approach to outside projects.
At the center of this conversation on Twitter were two high-profile Times journalists, Maggie Haberman, and Taylor Lorenz, the latter of whom recently left the Times for The Washington Post. The short version of what happened is that Lorenz pointed to the Insider article (in which she is quoted) and affirmed that it’s important for younger journalists especially to develop themselves as brands and Haberman responded by accusing Lorenz of attention-seeking, and a host of other established journalists chimed in with whatever the tweet equivalent is of a vomit emoji, mostly triggered by the word “brand” but also by the dynamic at play between Lorenz and Haberman.
Charles Arthur’s annotation, on his newsletter The Overspill:
Spiers captures the problem – which really really irks younger journalists on the big US papers – whereby journalists aren’t meant to draw attention to themselves, yet have to take all the crap for whatever they or anyone else on their paper writes.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading how Line Vaaben uses a one-word theme and colour-coded post-its to find the path through her stories, on Nieman Storyboard.
I’m watching Star Trek: Picard Season 2. How good was the second episode, huh?
I’m listening to how the ‘investigative journalism’ aesthetic can be used to launder power-serving narratives on Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
More stray links:
Stuck, a long-read on the endless search to cure stuttering—and what’s been lost in the process by Amy Reardon for Believer Magazine.
When women make headlines, an interactive piece analysing more than 382,000 headlines to see how women are represented (or misrepresented) in the news by Leonardo Nicoletti and Sahiti Sarva on The Pudding.
The problem with training programmes targeting people of colour by S. Mitra Kalita for Time.
Chart of the week
Big Tech ploughs ahead with major acquisitions despite tougher regulatory scrutiny, report Margaret Harding McGill and Ashley Gold for Axios:
Agreed, Picard is really good but Discovery is just too preachy for me. Too much talking and not enough action. Star Trek has always been progressive but in an action-speaks-louder-than-words way.