Using AI to fight misinformation
In his latest newsletter, Bruce Schneier springboarded off of articles in Washington Post and The Atlantic to write: There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing…
journalism
49 posts
An ambigram in The Hindu
The Hindu has an unusual ad in today’s paper (at least in the Chennai edition, which I get) on the occasion of Republic Day. At the middle is an ambigram that reads “journalism” one way and “democrac…
12 years and counting
I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industr…
A Q&A about philosophy in journalism
Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing…
Hasan Minhaj's search for the premise
When Hasan Minhaj spoke on his show about living through some dangerous experiences as a Muslim man from an Indian family growing up in the US of A, he wasn't speaking the truth. He told Clare Mal…
Nature paper says bad news is good news
'Negativity drives online news consumption', Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023: Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massi…
10 years in journalism
Thinking about the number '10' is hard. It's the number of years I will have soon been a journalist for (as will my ACJ batchmates). Why commemorate it? * In this time, I've seen man…
On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News
On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020,…
Political merch from a newsroom
Shekhar Gupta, the editor of The Print, shared the following image on his Instagram profile a couple days ago: The post had the following note: Since we so love politics at ThePrint, we are developi…
Cooperative distrust
Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and th…
Scicommers as knowledge producers
Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar's column in The Wire Science, 'More Fun Than Fun', about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated a…
On the lab-leak hypothesis
One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus's "lab leak" origin hypothesis is a problem I'm starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and dis…