Thursday March 23 Class

Networked Ch 1 Discussion Questions

1. What is networked journalism and what are networked publics?

2. How was the first (1991) Gulf War covered (including what is the CNN effect, why did Cheney call it the “best covered war”?, and how control of the narrative was a achieved)?

3. What is the high modern period of journalism and what were the historical, cultural, economic and political conditions that spurred its existence?

4. What is objectivity and how did it come about as a professional norm and what biases come along with it?

5. How was the 2003 Iraq war coverage different? (How was control of the story lost?)

6. Why look at tech and journalism as “culture”?

7. What are the various models of journalism described and what are the ultimate goals of the elitist democratic, the deliberative, and the pluralist model?

8. What does it mean to expand the sphere of legitimate debate?

Disrupting the dominant narrative of the Iraq war

Hometown Bagdad

Salam Pax

Abu Ghraib

Why do Algorithms matter to news?  

Mike's questions: 

1) What happens when a story housed on Facebook servers meets New York Times editorial guidelines but conflicts with Facebook’s Community Standards? 

2) When an explosion hit East Harlem, Times journalists had at their disposal an experimental tool called CityBeat: software that automatically gathers social media data geotagged from a location and asks Amazon Mechanical Turk (crowdsourced) workers to decide whether the data represent a “newsworthy event.” As such systems become more common, will the public editor have access to the crowd workers enlisted as temporary editors and be able to explain their reasoning? Will she be able to suggest tweaks to editorial algorithms that detect stories in some areas but not others, translating ideals of news-coverage diversity into computer code?

3) As The New York Times continues to experiment with virtual reality projects that embed readers in first-person points of view, how will the public editor hold reporters, engineers, and audiences accountable to the obligations of this new kind of witnessing? Media scholar Roger Silverstone says the best kind of witnessing comes from “proper distance” — when viewers are close enough to scenes to empathize with them, but far enough away to appreciate the power they have to influence them. Will the next public editor show Times journalists, virtual reality technologists, and embedded audiences the power of being both immersed and removed?