Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Last Sunday morning on Reliable Sources, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked his considerable audience to be on guard for one of this election cycle’s most ugly features: fake news sites. He accurately them called “a plague” across the internet. He proposed a new rule for social-media users: “Triple check before you share,” and he offered some useful tips on how to do that.

I’m not a fan of CNN’s generally atrocious political coverage in the past 18 months, to put it mildly. But I am a big fan of Stelter’s work; he’s currently the beacon of light at the news channel. His don’t-fall-for-fake-news advice, part of a series of commentaries he’s been delivering, is a key reason why.

In pieces like the one that ran on Sunday, Stelter has done what the traditional media have largely failed to do: Leading the way in bringing media-literacy skills to the wider public. Given the size of his audience, on TV and online, it is probably no exaggeration to call him, as I did the other day, “America’s most influential teacher of media literacy in the digital age.”...

Newsrooms are posting more of their content directly to social media platforms, but with little idea of what the rewards will be.
That insight comes from data presented by researchers at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University last week at a half-day event, “Digital News in a Distributed Environment.”

Researchers surveyed more than 40 journalists and news media executives, from both national and local brands, as well as eight executives from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Snapchat. They also held a roundtable attended by fifteen social media and audience editors.

They found that a publisher’s business model is what determines its social media strategy – and no one solution works, said Claire Wardle, the research director at the Tow Center. While some publishers are optimistic about the new opportunities that social media provides, others feel powerless. And relationships between publishers and platforms are not always amicable, with one respondent referring to a platform as a “frenemy.”...