HCRHS Media Lit

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet Wednesday with TV and radio host Glenn Beck and other prominent figures on the right following allegations the social media giant's "Trending Topics" feature has been biased against conservatives.  "It would be interesting to look him in the eye as he explains and a win for all voices if we can come to a place of real trust with this powerful tool," Beck wrote on Facebook. "

"Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef?"

"TV news is corrupt and incentivized to accentuate conflict over clarity, with Washington's media and politicians constituting "an incredibly corrupt and blinded, symbiotic terrarium," according to Jon Stewart. The comic-satirist and longtime TV host left no doubt that he's not softened toward the media, government or the political process since exiting "The Daily Show" during an appearance at the University of Chicago Monday."

"Unruly co-founder and co-CEO Sarah Wood explains which aspects of an ad are relevant when seeking widespread success online including the level of emotional intensity and the diversity and strength of users' social motivations.  Wood also dispels some of the misconceptions surrounding virality. "There's a myth around video success-which is if you get a million views or 5 million views, then you've got a successful video," Wood says. "All that view shows is how much you spent on the media. If you want to think and understand why people shared that video, and if it really has been a viral success where word of mouth played a key part, then you need to be measuring the shares." "

"Google is reportedly readying its entry into the online TV industry with a YouTube service by the name of "Unplugged," which would feature a skinny bundle of TV channels."

Wrong, wrong, wrong - to the very end, we got it wrong. Recently - as in Tuesday - the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points. You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans - especially the young - do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate. But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right."

"What would happen if the most powerful technology company in the world and the largest clandestine spying agency in the world joined forces? No need to wonder. Just look around you. It's happened already. Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, "we the people" have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again."

""News media literacy" isn't just about being able to read and understand the news; the term also refers to the ability to analyze the news for reliability and accuracy and distinguish between fact, opinions and assertions. This task - for the journalist and the citizen in a democratic society - grows increasingly difficult in the digital age as the number of news generators proliferates and the process of creating content becomes less uniform."

"Beyoncé's "Lemonade" album has sent pop culture critics and gossip columnists into overdrive. One line in particular, "Becky with the good hair," raised questions about infidelity and marital strife, but MTV's Rebecca Thomas says it's also a carefully coded lyric that says something much more complicated about black women in America."

"The release this weekend of Beyonce's sixth studio album, "Lemonade," and accompanying hour-long movie - which is as much a part of the release as the audio album - is being hailed by reviewers as her most accomplished work yet. The album has been called complicated, eclectic, powerful and edgy, and boasts an impressive list of collaborators, including Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd and Diplo."

Every once in a while, a meme rises up from the wondrous bog of entertaining nonsense that is the Internet. To achieve mainstream recognition, the meme and its creators must pass through a ceremonial rite of passage called "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," where past luminaries like Alex from Target, Rebecca Black and Lydia Lee (the Adele-singing student) have gathered to extend their 15 minutes of fame. That would also be true for the creators of "Damn, Daniel," the latest Internet sensation. The video was shared hundreds of thousands of times as it leapfrogged from Snapchat to YouTube, Twitter and basically every other social platform. Take a look."

"In an attempt to raise awareness about online bullying of women in sports, that is exactly what "Just Not Sports" did. In their new #MoreThanMean PSA, real men -- who were not the original authors of the messages -- read detestable tweets directed at sportswriters Julie DiCaro and espnW's Sarah Spain ... to their faces. The men struggle with their delivery as they digest the vulgar messages, and eventually apologize on behalf of their entire gender."

"The social media build up to Sunday night's Game of Thrones season six premiere was colossal, and the buzz certainly didn't stop while it aired on HBO. We asked a couple data providers for figures around the show, and below are the 6 we found most interesting."

"To make up for some of that lost revenue, NBC will offer advertisers the opportunity for sponsored content within the weekly live show."

"When news spread Thursday that Prince had died, everyone from Oprah to the president of the United States posted their love for the legendary pop music icon on social media. Then something weird started to happen. Cereal, liquor and office-supply companies took to social media to say how sad they were about Prince's passing -- by using their products as the means of communicating sorrow. When Cheerios posted a purple graphic with the text "rest in peace" (with a single Cheerio dotting the "i"), Prince fans were outraged the company would inject its brand into its condolences. Cheerios later deleted the tweet."

"Curt Schilling, dismissed by ESPN as a baseball analyst this week after sharing what has been widely described as an anti-transgender message on his Facebook page, says the network has different rules based "completely and solely on your perspective and your beliefs.""

"When Beyoncé's album "Lemonade" was released late Saturday night, it was available only on Tidal, a big win for that subscription streaming service, in which Beyoncé is a part owner. But Tidal's period of exclusivity appears to be quite short - just 24 hours, as the album is expected to be released for sale on iTunes at midnight on Sunday, according to two people briefed on the plans for the release, who, following the usual ironclad rules of secrecy surrounding Beyoncé's projects, were not authorized to discuss them. Apple declined to comment. The brief window of exclusivity for Tidal reflects the growing complexity and fragmentation of the digital music market. For Beyoncé, whose every move is watched intensely by the music business, releasing an album comes with seemingly irreconcilable pressures regarding, on the one hand, managing her business interests and, on the other, reaching as wide an audience as possible. Adele declined to stream her blockbuster album "25" on any service, and Taylor Swift removed all her albums from Spotify before the release of "1989," her latest album, which is available on Apple Music, the company's streaming service. Photo Beyonce with her husband, Jay Z, before the streaming music service Tidal was introduced last year. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times As a partner in Tidal - the service that her husband, Jay Z, bought just over a year ago for $56 million and reintroduced as an artist-friendly alternative to Spotify - Beyoncé faced a strong incentive to release the album exclusively through that outlet, to draw attention to the service and attract subscribers to it. Yet with Tidal claiming just three million subscribers, she would risk alienating the vast majority of the online market if she were to keep the album on that service alone for too long. (Spotify has 30 million paying subscribers, and Apple Music has 11 million.) And the extremely brief window for keeping "Lemonade" -

"Smartphones. They hold more potential distractions than a carnival. And more potential for family conflicts, as well. That's the subject of "Screenagers," directed by Delaney Ruston, a primary care doctor and filmmaker who took up the topic in the midst of conflicts over screen time in her own family. In the film, Ruston discusses the issue with parents, academics, mental health professionals and kids, including her own, in an attempt to get a handle on the enormous shift taking place in how tweens and teens interact with the world and each other."

"A new comprehensive study, conducted by The Media Insight Project, shows that trust and reliability in news can be broken down into specific factors that publishers can put into action and consumers can recognize. The study also finds that in the digital age, several new factors largely unexamined before - such as the intrusiveness of ads, navigability, load times, and having the latest details - also are critical in determining whether consumers consider a publisher competent and worthy of trust. The specific factors that lead people to trust and rely on a news source also vary by topic, the study finds. How much consumers value a specific component related to trust depends, for instance, on whether they are seeking news about politics or traffic and weather, let alone lifestyle. On some topics, consumers rate in‑depth reporting and expert sources more highly. In others, ease of use is of higher value. For still others, being entertained is more important. And in social media, consumers are fairly skeptical of content and want cues of trustworthiness such as clear identification of the original reporting source."

"It started with a post on social media. Or, to be more exact, a series of posts about a visit to McDonald's to buy a milkshake. Within hours, Josh Raby's gripping account on Twitter was international news, covered by respected outlets on both sides of the Atlantic. "This guy's story about trying to buy a McDonald's milkshake turned into a bit of a mission and the internet can't get enough of it," read the headline on Indy100, the Independent's sister title. The New York Daily News said he'd been "tortured". Except, as McDonald's pointed out - and Raby himself later admitted - the story was embellished to entertain his Twitter followers, although he says he based it on real events. Raby's was the latest thinly sourced story that, on closer inspection, turned out not to be as billed. The phenomenon is largely a product of the increasing pressure in newsrooms that have had their resources slashed, then been recalibrated to care more about traffic figures. And, beyond professional journalists, there is also a "whole cottage industry of people who put out fake news", says Brooke Binkowski, an editor at debunking website Snopes. "They profit from it quite a lot in advertising when people start sharing the stories. They are often protected because they call themselves 'satire' or say in tiny fine print that they are for entertainment purposes only.""