By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Sept. 22, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

Cautionary tale of The Outline: Why venture capital & high-flying newsrooms can fail: The Outline had it all — big name founders (Joshua Topolsky of Bloomberg), a roster of high-profile writers, and plenty of VC cash. But by earlier this month, the site had no staff writers. So what went wrong? Mathew Ingram in CJR writes: “The answer is partly editorial ambition (or hubris) and partly poor timing, and provides yet another example of how venture capital funding and building a digital media business rarely go well together.” A good read.

#MeToo China inspires user-generated investigative journalism: In China, traditional investigative reporting is withering under an assault from the Communist Party. But a grass-roots form of investigative reporting is springing up, at least in the case of the #MeToo movement. Thousands of women are posting their stories about sexual harassment and assault on popular platforms, often in “excruciating” detail and with supporting documents. Then reporters are picking through social media to find the facts and report them. And it’s working, as a number of prominent people have been investigated. By Ying Chan for Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Why news weeklies like Time lost so much of their value: Time magazine — once great, now irrelevant — was just sold. How did giants like Time and Newsweek go from dominance to afterthoughts? Mainly because they were the Huffington Posts of their day, argues media critic Simon Owens. Once a week, they took news from around the country and turned into easily digestible news chunks. Where’s the market for that now? Nowhere. An interesting take on how the mighty have fallen.

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AI, Media and the Threat to Democracy

Interested in the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and the Media?

We have just the conference for you.

Registration

When: Friday, Oct. 12

Where: Northeastern University, Boston

Cost: Free & open to the public

My unsolicited advice: Register now. Seats filling faster than anticipated.

Keynote: Danielle Citron, Morton & Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Panels:

1. AI on the Beat: How journalists are using — and covering — bots, algorithms and whatever comes next

2. AI, big data, and bias in sociotechnical systems

3. Legal and Policy Responses to AI and the Media

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