Re: Rebuilding Local News

I just found two more hopefully interesting articles on these topics:


All News is Bad News: And the Really Bad News is that It's Your Fault
https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity

One big problem here is that while people enjoy clicking on content that makes them mad and then angrily sharing it so their peers can share their outrage, being mad all the time is not actually satisfying or conducive to human happiness.

An interesting part of the Sacerdote, Sehgal, and Cook paper<https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.dartmouth.edu/dist/4/2318/files/2021/03/Why-Is-All-Covid-News-Bad-News-3_22_21.pdf> is their note that audience demand for negativity seems to exist cross-nationally, but the United States stands out in that our media sector is more willing to supply it. They speculate that this has something to do with the United States having a more competitive and more efficient media sector, rather than a lot of “fair and balanced” regulations or a big bland public broadcaster that dominates the scene.

If I could sum my thesis up, most people like to blame “the media” for things, and most media people like to blame big tech for things. There is truth to all of that, but on another level, the problem is the audience.


One-third of U.S. Newspapers as of 2005 Will be Gone by 2024
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/16/newspapers-decline-hedge-funds-research

The decline of local newspapers accelerated so rapidly in 2023 that analysts now believe the U.S. will have lost one-third of the newspapers it had as of 2005 by the end of next year — rather than in 2025, as originally predicted.

Most communities that lose a local newspaper in America usually do not get a replacement, even online.

The authors of the report argue that dynamic "poses a far-reaching crisis for our democracy as it simultaneously struggles with political polarization, a lack of civic engagement and the proliferation of misinformation and information online."


From the first article, in addition to the aforementioned fear-related and fearmongering concerns, there is also anger and related outrage journalism<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_porn> to consider. Broadening, here is an encyclopedic article about all known emotions<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification>.

Beyond the concerns about sensational, emotionally-charged content prevailing over local news content, there is also perceived relevance to consider: how could news of a city council meeting, a meeting between a mayor and local business leaders, news of a local bake sale, or news of another event at a local library or community center compete for readers' attention with national or world news about a critical summit of world leaders?

There are also comparative audience sizes to consider... the economics of advertising to audiences of different sizes for local and national news content.

It is important to be aware of these topics when designing and developing centralized, decentralized, or distributed social media systems, content-distribution algorithms, and related standards (see also: W3C ActivityPub<https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/>).


Best regards,
Adam

P.S.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality

P.P.S.:
https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2023 12:34 AM
To: Felipe Ribeiro <operarioribeiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Emily Ryan <emily.ryan@civicactions.com>; public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Rebuilding Local News

Also, here are three articles presenting ideas which differ from, some rebutting, ideas which I have shared:


  1.  https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/11/06/documents_shed_new_light_on_feds_collusion_with_private_actors_to_police_speech_on_social_media_990672.html
  2.  https://www.newsguardtech.com/misinformation-monitor/october-2023/
  3.  https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/common-abuses-mastodon-primer

I recently shared information about the GDELT project<https://www.gdeltproject.org/> as a solution for measuring news content at scale, this being useful for scientifically improving real-world content-distribution algorithms, towards mitigating complex-systemic feedback loops which might elevate individuals' and groups' fears and anxieties. Public opinion data would also be a component of these scientific measurements and analyses [1][2][3].

Hyperlink #1<https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/11/06/documents_shed_new_light_on_feds_collusion_with_private_actors_to_police_speech_on_social_media_990672.html>, above, expresses some concerns including about the Stanford Internet Observatory<https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io>, a similar solution.

In the past, the prevalence of sockpuppets, bots, and cyborgs on social media was a more pressing concern and I opined that account verification (which at the time for only for celebrities), digital-signatures, and, perhaps into the future, digital IDs could be components of solutions. An analogy was that of a town hall meeting, where orators stand as they speak and are non-anonymous to other assembled participants. However, in the United States of America, notable citizens and journalists have historically used pseudonyms [4]. In theory, digital-signatures-based solutions could be designed which include overtly pseudonymous accounts with which to securely digitally-sign content on behalf of one or more contributors.

Rebutting the idea that verified accounts would entirely curtail misinformation and disinformation, hyperlink #2<https://www.newsguardtech.com/misinformation-monitor/october-2023/>, above, claims that verified accounts on X are producing 74% of the platform's most viral false or unsubstantiated claims pertaining to the Israel-Hamas War. This article also raises concerns with respect to X's Community Notes<https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/community-notes> features.

In the past, I have also brainstormed about decentralized social media solutions, e.g., Mastodon, and about more intricate peer-to-peer systems, including systems with varieties of user roles, e.g., for moderation and administrative duties. Hyperlink #3<https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/common-abuses-mastodon-primer>, above, raises some concerns with respect to decentralized social media.

Hopefully, these comparative ideas and viewpoints are both useful and interesting to the group towards brainstorming solutions to rebuild<https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/> local news<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_news>.


Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/research-centers/babbie-center/survey-american-fears.aspx
[2] https://democracy.psu.edu/research/mood-of-the-nation-poll/
[3] https://www.apmresearchlab.org/motn/hope-worry-2022
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_American_Constitutional_debates

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:00 AM
To: Felipe Ribeiro <operarioribeiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Emily Ryan <emily.ryan@civicactions.com>; public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Rebuilding Local News

Thank you, Felipe. It alleviates my worries that these civics, media, and technology topics have already been and are being considered by others including in the contexts of media ethics.

With respect to utilizing advancements to natural-language processing and AI to measure news content:

https://jigsaw.google.com/

Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies and builds technology that inspires scalable solutions.

https://www.gdeltproject.org/

Supported by Google Jigsaw, the GDELT Project monitors the world's broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world.

The GDELT Project came from a desire to better understand global human society and especially the connection between communicative discourse and physical societal-scale behavior. The vision of the GDELT Project is to codify the entire planet into a computable format using all available open information sources that provides a new platform for understanding the global world.

The GDELT project desires to better understand dynamics beyond the ones I broached (negativity, sensationalism, consumer demand, resultant production, content-distribution algorithms, feedback loops, anxiety, mood). The GDELT project came from a desire to better understand dynamics between communicative discourse and physical societal-scale behavior.


Best regards,
Adam

P.S.: See also: https://iptc.org/ .

________________________________
From: Felipe Ribeiro <operarioribeiro@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2023 1:06 AM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Cc: Emily Ryan <emily.ryan@civicactions.com>; public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Rebuilding Local News

Center for Media Engagement Media Ethics Initiative<https://mediaengagement.org/media-ethics>
International Journal for Ethics & Society (IJES) Professional Ethics Codes for Global Media<http://ijethics.com/article-1-42-en.pdf>
London School of Economy  (LSE) Media Policy Project (MPP)<http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/media-policy-project>
Civic Charter for Peoples Participation<https://icscentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Civic_Charter_-_The_Global_Framework_for_Peoples_Participation.pdf>
Media Ethics Initiative Art, Aesthetics, & Ethics Case Studies<https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/aesthetics-ethics-case-studies/>
Media Literacy for Citizenship (EAVI)<https://eavi.eu/>
New Media Rights (NMR) Legal and Guides for Creators and Organizations<https://www.newmediarights.org/legal_how_to_guides_for_citizen_media_creators_online_publishing>
Peace in Media Index<https://www.paznamidia.com.br/ivm/>
Free Media World Forum (FMML)<http://www.fmml.net/>
Article 19 Social Media Councils Consultation<https://www.article19.org/resources/social-media-councils-consultation/>
W3C Media Resources Ontology Recommendation<https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaont-10/>