Month: June 2015

The prospect that the pope, from his perch at the pinnacle of the Catholic church, will exhort humanity to act on climate change as a moral imperative is a direct threat to a core belief of US conservatives. And conservatives – anxious to hang on to their flock – are lashing out.

“The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours,” James Inhofe, the granddaddy of climate change deniers in the US Congress and chairman of the Senate environment and public works committee, said last week, after picking up an award at a climate sceptics’ conference.

There has been another constant through Gawker’s history: an indiscriminate solicitation of clicks. Mr. Denton has long posted the number of page views alongside each item published on Gawker’s sites. If pride — or shame — did not provide a powerful enough incentive for writers to cater to the tastes of Internet surfers, they were paid bonuses based on how much traffic they generated.

But in recent months, Mr. Denton’s once-straightforward relationship with traffic has grown more complicated. It seems to have occurred to him that the quest for eyeballs doesn’t always produce the highest-quality content.

“A lot of our traffic last year came from stories that we weren’t ultimately proud of,” Mr. Denton said. He cited Gawker Media’s biggest traffic sensation in 2014, a video compilation of people messing up the Ice Bucket Challenge that has attracted more than 16 million views. “You’re going to get a spike from a story like that, but at the end of the year, what does it say about your brand, and are you measuring that?”

It’s noteworthy that Sunlight’s dance in 2012 was based on creating a human curation workflow for looking at these deleted tweets — the “layer of journalistic judgment” Gates references. That takes the deleted tweet from a direct API-generated product to something journalistic. That argument worked in 2012; it apparently doesn’t in 2015. Erasing that journalistic distinction could conceivably allow Twitter to argue the display of any deleted tweet in any form on a website was a violation of the developer agreement — so long as the Twitter API was in use anywhere on the site.

Now, realistically, Twitter isn’t going to tell The New York Times to take down a story centered on a deleted congressional tweet — the blowback would be 100× what they’ve faced in the past 24 hours.

But the fact that Twitter now explicitly says the journalistic exception it once recognized is no longer valid — and the fact that its developer agreement language defines the governed “Services” so broadly — demands, at a minimum, that Twitter explain itself more thoroughly than a one-paragraph statement. The public utterances of public officials deserve scrutiny beyond those of everyday citizens — that’s a core value of a free press.

If we continue to make black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis.

While younger users get more news from Facebook, they are less familiar with many sources of news than their older counterparts, the survey found. The survey asked about familiarity with 36 different news sources — ranging from The New Yorker to Breitbart — and millennials had heard of half of the outlets at “substantively lower rates” than the older cohorts.

Conversely, there were only two news sources about which millennials were more aware than their elders: BuzzFeed and Google News. A third of millennials find news on Google News, compared to 18 percent for those in Gen X and 15 percent of baby boomers.