Re: Rebuilding Local News

Thank you for sharing that Thi Nguyen publication and website!

Complicating the design of some games or systems is that business models involving users subscribing to services face competition with free<https://hbr.org/2011/06/competing-against-free>, e.g., competition with advertisement-driven models.

Also, in addition to X, TikTok is (or was [3]) being utilized for news sharing [1][2] and younger audiences may have wider definitions of what is newsworthy [3].

I am wondering about how best to understand how different types of users choose what to consume and to share when presented with multiple news articles or narratives vying for their attention. I am worried that people tend to consume and to share more negative news than good news and about how this might drive the production of such content. A cause for optimism, however, is that, with unfolding advancements to natural-language processing and AI, such things can increasingly be measured.

I hope that the story about the 2014 mitigation of clickbait indicates that ideas and solutions can and do result in changes to systems.


Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/21/more-americans-are-getting-news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-on-other-social-media-sites/

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/

[3] https://mashable.com/article/tiktok-news-publishers


________________________________
From: Emily Ryan <emily.ryan@civicactions.com>
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2023 7:59 AM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Cc: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Rebuilding Local News

I am currently studying the effects of digital media on the rise of mis/disinformation for my thesis work and I would also recommend reading work by noted philosopher and professor Thi Nguyen, who writes about the deep psychological methods utilized by media platforms such as Twitter (now "X") to amplify sensational information. His piece "How Twitter Gamifies Communication<https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUHTG&aid=NGUHTGv1>" gets into the weeds and explains how such tactics tend towards reinforcing epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. His entire body of work is worth more exploration if this area interests folks (https://objectionable.net/philosophy/)

Creating new platforms is a hard uphill battle and I'm not convinced yet that is the solution here. I do subscribe to the belief that the loss of local news is having a profound effect on how false information spreads and am grateful for your efforts here - I've bookmarked a lot of what you've sent and plan to do some more deep diving. So thank you for sharing this!

emily

On Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 2:01 AM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>> wrote:

Civic Technology Community Group,


Following-up on that hyperlink to Rebuild Local News<https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/>, I would like to share some more information, theories, and opinions about how interoperating media-psychological, sociological, technological, attention-economic, and economic systems may have contributed to – and may still be contributing to – the decline of local and community news.


Firstly, from a statistics-filled 2021 blog article, 16 Eye-opening Negative News Statistics You Need to Know<https://letter.ly/negative-news-statistics>:

  1.  Approximately 90% of all media news is negative.
  2.  Sensational stories form 95% of media headlines.
  3.  Nielsen ratings are at fault for 50% of negative news statistics.
  4.  38% of Americans believe the media exaggerated the COVID-19 coverage.
  5.  Approximately 1 in 10 American adults checks the news every hour.
  6.  A website lost 66% of its readers when it published positive stories for a day.
  7.  Studies show that headlines with bad news catch 30% more attention.
  8.  Reports show 65% of news organizations ignore mistakes.
  9.  Around 26.7% of people that are exposed to negative news go on to develop anxiety.
  10. An average of 79% of media companies print biased stories for advertisers.
  11. Headline manipulation has been proven to double readership.
  12. A staggering 87% of the COVID-19 coverage in 2020 was negative.
  13. People are 49% more likely to read something negative than positive.
  14. 63% of kids aged 12–18 say that watching the news makes them feel bad.
  15. Most people blame the public for the popularity of negative news headlines.
  16. 79% of Americans believe media articles are not balanced in their arguments.


Secondly, here are a few relevant encyclopedia articles:

  *   Attention economy<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy>
  *   Mediatization<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediatization_(media)>
  *   Influence of mass media<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_mass_media>
  *   Media psychology<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_psychology>
  *   Sociotechnology<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnology>


Thirdly, here are a couple of scholarly and scientific publications about news-sharing behaviors on social media:

  *   Lee, Chei Sian, Long Ma, and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. "Why do people share news in social media?." In Active Media Technology: 7th International Conference, AMT 2011, Lanzhou, China, September 7-9, 2011. Proceedings 7, pp. 129-140. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011.
  *   Wong, Lorraine YC, and Jacquelyn Burkell. "Motivations for sharing news on social media." In Proceedings of the 8th International conference on social media & society, pp. 1-5. 2017.


Fourthly, around 2014, some system changes were needed and implemented to mitigate clickbait models. From a Wikipedia article, Clickbait<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait>:

By 2014, the ubiquity of clickbait on the web had begun to lead to a backlash against its use. Satirical newspaper The Onion launched a new website, ClickHole, that parodied clickbait websites such as Upworthy and BuzzFeed, and, in August 2014, Facebook announced that it was taking technical measures to reduce the impact of clickbait on its social network, using, among other cues, the time spent by the user on visiting the linked page as a way of distinguishing clickbait from other types of content. Ad blockers and a general fall in advertising clicks also affected the clickbait model, as websites moved toward sponsored advertising and native advertising where the content of the article was more important than the click-rate.


In my opinion, new solutions for rebuilding local and community news will be found by considering interoperating media-psychological, sociological, technological, attention-economic, and economic systems. Any thoughts on these approaches or on any other approaches?



Best regards,

Adam Sobieski

P.S.: Also, for purposes of discussion, here are some technology-related ideas: (1) manual, semi-automated, and automated news aggregation on community portals and pages on social media, (2) new models of and user experiences for sharing news content on social media, e.g., sharing with automatically-collated groups of users' contacts who also reside in their communities, cities, and towns, (3) routing news content to users based on their preferences, settings, and configurations, (4) personalized digital newspapers, (5) news distribution techniques based on real-time event stream processing, and (6) decentralized software systems with digital-signatures-based features for contributing, verifying, and upvoting news content.

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>>
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2023 10:39 PM
To: public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org> <public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org>>
Subject: Rebuilding Local News

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. I would like to share a hyperlink to Rebuild Local News (https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/).

Local news is collapsing – threatening the civic well-being of American towns and cities. The Rebuild Local News Coalition advocates for nonpartisan public policies to increase the number of reporters covering schools, city hall, businesses, and other facets of community life.

Rebuild Local News is a nonpartisan , nonprofit coalition whose member organizations 3,000+ newsrooms, including family-owned newspapers, nonprofit websites, weeklies, ethnic publications, hyperlocal sites, and rural papers – as well as civic organizations and other groups pushing to save local journalism.


Any thoughts on how AI and civic technology could help to contribute to rebuilding local news? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski



--
Emily Ryan
emily.ryan@civicactions.com<mailto:emily.ryan@civicactions.com>