DataDownload: NYT and COVID, Andrew Yang,
DataDownload: NYT and COVID, Andrew Yang, A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
I’m wearing a mask whenever I’m out in public. And on the streets, almost all of my neighbors are too. We’re adapting. And the New York Times is adapting too. Their front page was reinvented — to cover COVID-19. Last week’s Media Lab Summit talked a lot about media, and changing times. So the idea that people need to swear off Social Media until after they cast their vote caught our eye. Fake news and the power and responsibility of the social networks has us deeply suspicious of almost everything we’re reading. Tristan Harris — of The Social Dilemma — says try swapping phones with a friend, and see how different their Facebook feed is. It may shock you. His podcast is what we’re listening to this week…
And, our conversation with Andrew Yang made news. Forbes, and Adexchanger. If you haven’t had a chance, take a look, it’s a timely and relevant conversation.
This is me writing in my calm Zen voice. How am I doing?
As always, reach out with ideas, suggestions, or feedback. Steve@nycmedialab.org.
Steve
Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read Why ‘The New York Times’ Reinvented Its Front Page to Cover COVID-19
The NY Times is still using its front page to display a country-wide COVID-19 synopsis, including new cases and new deaths over the past two weeks, along with a US heat map of COVID hotspots. But aside from the pragmatic use of its valuable digital real estate, the paper has also used its corporeal Sunday front page to tell a similar story in a very different way:
“In May, when the United States reached the grim milestone of 100,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, The New York Times turned its front page into a powerful memorial, a list of every American coronavirus fatality to date: name, age, hometown, and a personal detail. Topped by a banner headline, the gray page was as solemn as a tombstone.”
For executive editor Dean Baquet, stories shouldn’t just be told with stories: “We need for people to pick up the front page and understand that they are in the middle of something truly remarkable.” Fast Company spoke with Baquet on how design can amplify truth, why design can solve journalism’s biggest problems, and why print isn’t dead.
4 min read
Read more Take a Social Media Break Until You’ve Voted
“Social media is a cesspool, and it’s getting worse by the day.” — Greg Bensinger
NY Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger is urged readers to “take a bold step” and “stay off social media at least until you’ve voted” in a recent Opinion piece. Bensinger cites a Pew Research Center study that found that “nearly 60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events… compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps.” Among the 18–29 crowd, 48% get their news from social media.
Bensinger continues: “These companies have effectively conceded that their platforms’ huge scale makes them ungovernable. Like the Road Runner eluding Wile E. Coyote’s rocket-powered skates, misinformation will always remain one step ahead of the platforms’ police, whatever the latest high-tech tools.”
4 min read
Read More Tech+Media The News Site Was Bogus. Facebook Still Let It Build a Real Audience.
The Globe Independent publication had a knack for plagiarizing stories from NBC News, Radio Free Asia, WaPo, and others. Yet it was able to amass some 30k likes on Facebook before BuzzFeed reached out and alerted the platform of the account, which clearly violated Facebook’s policy. By now, we’re a bit jaded — we’ve come to expect this from large social media companies that cannot even pretend to control what their users are doing, even if it’s affecting the course of history.
What’s worrying is that the Globe Independent incident was recognized less than a month before the election, and by an external party. To make matters worse, on Thursday BuzzFeed published It Took Facebook More Than A Year — And A Whistleblower — To Remove A Troll Farm Connected To Azerbaijan’s Ruling Party.
5 min read Read More Why Media Formats (Like Snapchat Stories and TikTok Music Videos) Become Hits?
Head of Commerce Incubations at Facebook Eric Feng explores why media formats become hits. Case in point: the image above contains the “Stories” format from eight of the most popular social platforms in the US. And two of these networks — Pinterest and LinkedIn — released their version of Stories last month, a single day apart. They all let you use images, videos, and overlayed text to tell a vertically-aligned, bite-sized story. “While there may not be a single social platform that’s won over all users, there’s apparently a single media format that’s won over all social platforms,” remarks Feng.
What made Stories and other dominant formats so addictive? Feng thinks it comes down to simplicity and storytelling. Except… simplicity and storytelling are inversely correlated (see the chart below). So it falls on the media format’s ability to keep a balance between the two.
Furthermore, the Stories format didn’t spontaneously appear when it launched on Snapchat in 2013. “Stories was very much an evolution. It borrowed shortform videos and made them easier to create and more accessible, and made images and shortform text richer and more expressive. And through this evolution, Stories has carved out a new position on the Format Map that’s incredibly valuable.”
8 min read Read More Learn to Type by Copying Literary Masters
In 2011, Johnny Depp told The Guardian in an interview that Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby: “He’d look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.” In a similar vein, TypeLit.io, a side project by developer Adam Doquiatan that exploded on Hacker News and captured recent media attention, allows users to type out entire novels — from 1984 to The Call of Cthulhu to The Great Gatsby (and if you’re feeling masochistic, Ulysses).
1 min read
Read More What We’re Watching Andrew Yang Fireside Chat
Check out Andrew Yang’s full Fireside Chat from this year’s SUMMIT below!
42 min watch
Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Your Undivided Attention
Your Undivided Attention is the Center for Humane Technology’s podcast focused on exposing “the hidden designs that have the power to hijack our attention, manipulate our choices and destabilize our real world communities,” hosted by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin.
Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: Building Inclusive AI Products
Date: October 13, 2:30PM-3PM
Product Lead of ML and AI at Google Tulsee Doshi will share key lessons learned in how to ensure that ML / AI products truly work for all users. Register Here.
Virtual Event: ETL Speaker Series — Sylvia Acevedo, Author
Date: October 14, 7:30PM
An entrepreneur, investor, business leader, and rocket-scientist, Sylvia Acevedo is the author of Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist. Register Here. A Deeper Look How Netflix Finds Innovation on the Edge of Chaos
“The whole reason that Netflix has been able to reinvent itself continuously, is because Reed had the idea of setting up the culture in the organisation to be primed for this reinvention.” — INSEAD’s Erin Meyer
In Meyer and Reed Hastings’ book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, we learn that one of Netflix’s core tenets is that if you want to promote innovation, you hire the best and place as few restrictions on them as possible. That minimalist, non-limiting approach extends beyond talent acquisition — the vacation policy is that there’s no vacation policy, employees take whatever time they need. The expense policy is literally “Act in Netflix’s best interest” — that’s it.
Just as interesting is Hastings’ inspiration for the Netflix culture: in his previous company, Pure Solutions, he learned the hard way that as organizations grow, bureaucracy stifles originality. That lesson continued over to the early days of Netflix. When the dot-com bubble burst, Hastings had to layoff “less-stellar” colleagues. To his surprise, the remaining employees were even more engaged and productive. “He came to see that, for really top performers, a great work environment is stunning colleagues,” says Meyer.
Netflix’s approach to weeding out non-spectacular employees: the keeper test. “When evaluating an employee, managers are asked to imagine how they would react if that person were to resign. Would they fight to change the employee’s mind, or feel secretly relieved?”
8 min read
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