HCRHS Media Lit

"Radical tech and extreme anti-aging. Breathtaking challenges. And bold visions for the future. The September issue of Medium's monthly magazine - Youth, Now - explores the world being inherited, informed, and altered by the next generations. All month long, we will be publishing stories that illuminate our obsession with youth now and in the past - telling the stories of kids who may not be all right, but remain the best hope we have."

"Over the past many weeks, we dispatched nine reporters to find and interview 46 kids from wildly different backgrounds and from all over the country. Most of these kids are either 17 years old or high school seniors or both. In the interviews, you'll meet city kids and rural kids, pro-life teens and a kid who had to go to extraordinary lengths to get an abortion in Texas, U.S.-born kids and immigrants, kids for whom the future is golden, and kids who grew up in places where survival - much less success - is far from assured. We asked if they felt safe and optimistic, what they saw the future holding for themselves and their country, who they looked up to, and what older generations got wrong about them. But we also just talked to them about their lives. What did we find?"

"Some experts think people can become addicted to playing video games, much in the same way people are addicted to physical substances, but is that really possible? If you are a gamer, what motivates you to play? How do you resist temptation when you need to? If you don't play video games, is there another behavior that you think it would be possible to be addicted to?"

"People tell themselves all sorts of stories-some true and some less so-about whether owning visibly luxurious things (like cars, watches, or electronics) will serve them well. "Ugh, I'm so busy": A status symbol for our time One story that's true: Acquiring something luxurious can temporarily increase one's self-esteem. One story that's not: Acquiring something luxurious can impress potential friends."

"In recent years, the mass-sharing capabilities of the internet have facilitated a renewed (eye-rolling, faux-begrudging) appreciation of the dad joke. The Reddit page r/dadjokes, a forum where users go to share and enjoy "the jokes that make you laugh and cringe in equal measure," has more than 1 million subscribers and amasses several new posts every hour. The online video series Dad Jokes, which pits comedians and celebrities against each other in dad-joke-telling competitions where "if you laugh you lose," launched in 2017 and today has some 999,000 followers on Facebook. Twitter users, meanwhile, frequently call each other (and themselves) out for their simplest and squeaky-cleanest puns by tweeting "#dadjoke." Dad jokes are simultaneously beloved and maligned, deeply ingrained in the intimacies of family life and yet universal and public enough to have a hashtag. A specific tone and interpersonal dynamic converge to make a joke a dad joke-and the recent ubiquity of dad jokes might even reveal something about the states of modern fatherhood and humor."

"IN THE YEAR SINCE The New York Times's Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Harvey Weinstein story that catalyzed the #MeToo movement, a pattern has emerged. Powerful men are credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault, suspensions are levied, investigations are launched, and many of those men lose their jobs. But only occasionally, as in Ronan Farrow's reporting on CBS or Irin Cameron's speech at the 2018 Mirror Awards, are the institutions and systems that prop up these abusers challenged directly. At times over this period, journalists and observers have questioned what's next for #MeToo, and how the press will address not just the individual actions of a handful of bad actors, but the society that allowed them to get away with their actions in the first place. Coverage of the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have provided a window into what those next steps look like."

"When in doubt, blame the robots. As Facebook has fallen from grace and struggled to reconcile its role in spreading propaganda and stoking political anger, the company has proposed a familiar solution: If the algorithm has failed, let's just build a better algorithm. It's a noble goal for the next hackathon. As a mechanism for real change, however, the focus on software misses the point. Facebook's problems can't be solved with more data or better code. They're simply the most potent and alarming example of the fact that the internet has failed as a public forum."

"There was a time when The Learning Channel (TLC) actually focused on learning. There was a time when Bravo programmed cultural events. Now, entire networks have been revamped to prop up reality shows that aren't even real. As a result, the inability to pin down what's actually happening - to separate what's real from what's fake - seems to have infected everything. Take the 24-hour news cycle. The crop of pundits paid to fill airtime and spew talking points are just like those kids on The Real World, who knew exactly why they'd been cast and played their roles with gusto. In hindsight, it was only a matter of time before there were political consequences for blurring the line between real and fake."

"The female tween and early-teen confidence plunge is especially striking because multiple measures suggest that girls in middle and high school are, generally speaking, outperforming boys academically, and many people mistake their success for confidence. But the girls we talked with and polled detailed, instead, a worrisome shift. From girls 12 and under, we heard things such as "I make friends really easily-I can go up to anyone and start a conversation" and "I love writing poetry and I don't care if anyone else thinks it's good or bad." A year or more into their teens, it was "I feel like everybody is so smart and pretty and I'm just this ugly girl without friends," and "I feel that if I acted like my true self that no one would like me.""

"The slides for the LOEX 2018 session entitled Fake News, Lies, and a For-credit Class: Lessons Learned from Teaching a 7-Week Fake News Undergraduate Library Course can be seen on the right."

"How did Ninja become gaming's first crossover star? The Fortnite legend is relentless about one thing: He's always on."

"After years of oppressive aesthetic perfection, acne positivity is a drive for people to be more open about their skin problems, from the occasional spot to full-blown cystic acne. It joins recent moves to celebrate the many and varied appearances of our skin - from vitiligo to freckles and stretch marks - but also seeks to educate those who still believe that acne is a problem for the unwashed and unhealthy. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blogger Em Ford, who posted the Many trace the movement back to the British blogger Em Ford, who in 2015 posted a YouTube video called You Look Disgusting"

"The social network is working on new ways to determine when content has been manipulated"

""When a woman is emotional, she's 'hysterical' and she's penalized for it. When a man does the same, he's 'outspoken' and there are no repercussions." That was the message the tennis great Billie Jean King tweeted on Saturday, responding - as seemingly the rest of the internet has - to Serena Williams's fraught U.S. Open loss."

"THE RESULTS OF A NEW Knight Foundation and Gallup poll released on Tuesday won't come as a huge surprise to most journalists: Trust in the media is down. Again. A majority of those who were surveyed said they had lost trust in the media in recent years, and more than 30 percent of those who identified themselves as being on the conservative end of the spectrum said they had not only lost faith in the media, but they "expect that change to be permanent." According to a separate Gallup poll from earlier this year that tracked trust in major institutions, newspapers and television news were among the lowest, exceeded only by Congress."

""Hyperfocus" teaches readers to control their limited capacity to focus on and process things in the moment, which he calls our "attentional space." It turns out our brain's scratchpad is pretty small and can only hold a handful of tasks at a time. When one of those tasks is complex - like putting together a business proposal or taking care of a toddler - that number dwindles down to one or two. The problem is that our brains are predisposed toward distraction, wandering for an average of 47 percent of the day, writes Mr. Bailey. And those of us who sit in front of a computer, an endless source of novelty, typically work for only 40 seconds before being distracted or interrupted. As a result, our attentional space is constantly filled, which slows down our work."

"Below I have responded to common charges against contemporary upmarket journalism by explaining how it actually works day by day."

"Students at Capital Preparatory Magnet School, in Hartford, Connecticut, are watching a video of a basketball drill. "Keep track of how many passes the players dressed in white make," Marcus Stallworth tells them. He is a media-literacy educator. Many of the kids correctly count the number of passes. But they don't notice a man in a bear suit who moonwalks across the screen. Why did so many kids miss the furry bear? That's the question Stallworth asks them. The answer, he says, tells us something important about media literacy. For Stallworth, the video shows that people miss much of what's going on around them. "It's the same when we're reading information online," he told TIME for Kids. "It's important to be aware of the messages, and the ways authors are trying to capture our attention.""

"The term "fake news" is problematic for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is widely used to mean anything from "outright hoax" to "some information I do not like." Therefore, I refrain from using the term to describe media sources at all. Besides that, I refrain from discussing the term because I submit that the biggest problem in our current media landscape is not "hoax" stories that could legitimately be called "fake news." What is far more damaging to our civic discourse are articles and stories that are mostly, or even completely, based on the truth, but which are of poor quality for other reasons. This post is the first in a series I plan to do in which I visually rank one or more recent articles on my chart and provide an in-depth analysis of why each particular article is ranked in that spot.  My analysis includes discussions of the headlines, graphics, other visual elements, and the article itself. I analyze each element and each sentence by asking "what is this element/sentence doing?""