Improving data journalism’s international scope, China’s new ban on foreign media and more in this week's Digital Media Mash Up, produced by the Center for International Media Assistance.
Data journalism should thrive on cross-border collaborations — why doesn't it?
I was sitting in a Yangon tech hub on the first day of a two-week election data war room, with a bunch of Myanmar journalists still riding the high of the recent election. Aung San Suu Kyi was going to lead the country at last. Yangon was crawling with foreign correspondents—and there were more than 300 brand new media outlets in Myanmar, none of which were on very firm financial footing.
The election was not short on coverage, just on complex coverage. (Eva Constantaras, Internews, 2/19)
No digital publishing for foreign media in China
In another gesture of tightening control, the Chinese government issued a new directive earlier this month to forbid all foreign-owned media companies from publishing digitally. Marcus Brauchli, Managing Partner of North Base Media, an investment firm in media and technology firms with investment in the region, spoke to the World Editors Forum. (WAN-IFRA, 2/25)
How to think about bots
We live in a world of bots. Generally speaking, these sets of algorithms are responsible for so much on the backend of the internet, from making Google searches possible to filling up your spam folder. But an emergent kind of bot, capable of interacting with humans and acting on their behalf, is playing a more active role in our everyday lives.
Bots measure the technical health of the internet, share information on natural disasters, predict disease outbreaks, fulfill our lunch requests, and send news articles to networks of people on platforms like Twitter and Slack. They may even write some of those articles. They are also integral to social media propaganda campaigns, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and stock market manipulation. Bots have been shown to be capable of compelling humans to carry out small tasks and a “Siri-like” assistant has been proposed as a way to help drone pilots fire on their targets as a way to reduce “moral injury.” (Motherboard, 2/23)
Google awards funding to 128 European projects as part of its Digital News Initiative
Google will award more than £21m to 128 journalism projects in Europe as part of the first round of Digital News Initiative (DNI) funding, the company announced today.
The projects, hailing from 23 European countries, range from prototypes to medium and larger scale tools and platforms developed by publishers to improve their storytelling on digital platforms. (Journalism.co.uk, 2/24)
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Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via Penn State.
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