contemplect.

Professional journalism is younger than professional baseball and psychoanalysis. While the term journalism emerged in the early 19th century, it established professional codes, education, and associations only in the early 20th century. The first school of journalism in the United States, for example, was established at the University of Missouri in 1908.

This quality is problematic for social media right now because of an enormous amount of content is generated by people who are trying to manipulate the platforms, especially through bots that automatically ‘like’ or ‘share’ stories.

The consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age.

Facebook is now the most powerful publisher in the business, the mother of all media gatekeepers. Initially, that realization dawned on everybody except apparently Facebook itself, perhaps a willed state of ignorance. The company described its product as a mere “tool,” and protested that it played no role in organizing the news that it broadcasts, as if it weren’t imposing its values on the News Feed, as if it weren’t providing a sense of hierarchy to the mass of posts it splays.

Being online is really bad, and the way we interact with information on the web is a type of sickness unique to this moment in time. The news, as filtered through Twitter or Nuzzel or LinkedIn, comes in incremental microbursts, so instead of looking at aggregate events over time, we react to each bit of micro-news as if it is the worst thing that has ever happened. And since our president is likely on industrial-strength amphetamines, we exist online at his peril.

Melissa Zimdars has made a list of more than a hundred problematic news sites, along with tips for sorting the truthful from the troublesome. She talks with Brooke about how to be a savvy news consumer in a misinformation-filled world.[podcast]

ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, welcomes engagement. Where most investigative journalists zealously guard the secrecy of their projects in fear of getting scooped by a competitor, ProPublica’s journalists set up crowdsourcing forms that inform its investigative reporting on specific topics such as Agent Orange. After a story is published, its journalists respond to questions about the accuracy and story premise by publishing follow-ups.

A handful of celebrity journalists are betting their careers on the new model’s sustainability and commitment to quality. The departure of high-brand reporters Nate Silver, Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein and editors Jim Roberts and Bill Keller from major legacy newsrooms to all-digital startups—widely and woefully reported by the very media organizations they were leaving behind—triggered a ripple effect across the industry, creating a zeitgeist of optimism that genuine change had arrived to transform a moribund profession.

You can use Gobo to control what’s edited out of your feed, or configure it to include news and points of view from outside your usual orbit. Gobo aims to be completely transparent, showing you why each post was included in your feed and inviting you to explore what was filtered out by your current filter settings.