{"id":828,"date":"2018-09-12T13:18:21","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T17:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/nespa\/?page_id=828"},"modified":"2018-09-12T13:22:25","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T17:22:25","slug":"newsletter-summer-2018","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/nespa\/newsletter-archive\/newsletter-summer-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Newsletter Summer 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

NESPA hosts 70th Annual Conference<\/h2>\n

For details and procedures on membership, conference and workshop registration and entry forms, please download the PDF<\/a>.<\/h3>\n

Students and teachers from around the region attended 37 sessions at the New England Scholastic Press Association\u2019s 70th Annual Conference at Boston University\u2019s College of Communication Friday, May 4.<\/p>\n

Martin Nisenholtz, who helped put The New York Times<\/cite> on line, gave the keynote speech, \u201cFacebook, Fake News and the Future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the other session topics were visual story telling, how to hold the powerful accountable through investigative reporting, conducting surveys and creating infographics, making your news stand out online, the First Amendment and FOI laws, news interviews, feature writing, live sports broadcasting, profile writing, public relations, round tables for editors in chief, trends in yearbook theme, design and coverage, and breaking into the news business.<\/p>\n

Speakers included College of Communication faculty, journalism professionals from the New England region, and high school advisers and staff members.<\/p>\n

The ceremony for All New England Awards in Scholastic Editing and Publishing along with a special award to a school administrator for his support of the scholastic press. <\/p>\n

Also in this posting are the 70 suggestions the Board of Judges has offered on how staffs can improve their work. <\/p>\n

For Special Achievement Awards and Localizing Contest winners please see Vol. 23, No. 3 of NESPA News<\/cite><\/a> on this site.<\/p>\n

Accountability crucial, keynote speaker says Journalists need to regain public\u2019s trust<\/h2>\n

by Dakota Antelman<\/h3>\n

Martin Nisenholtz, who helped The New York Times<\/cite> launch its online operations more than 20 years ago, discussed needed changes to the digital media marketplace.<\/p>\n

In his keynote address, \u201cFacebook, Fake News and the Future,\u201d at the 70th New England Scholastic Press Association annual conference Friday, May 4, he urged listeners to learn about the business side of social media, to demand accountability from outlets and to develop better media literacy. <\/p>\n

He linked those lessons back to Facebook and the seismic impact it has had on the news industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Facebook draws the data<\/strong> of over two billion users worldwide, it becomes the most effective advertising operation in history,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Journalism, Nisenholtz noted, costs money, and before Facebook, the businesses producing it were funding themselves largely through advertising sales. Facebook, however, destabilized that once thriving income source, Nisenholtz said.<\/p>\n

On Facebook, he said, \u201cyou\u2019re buying the audience you want and paying for that audience directly through the Facebook ad platform.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe money is then moving out of websites that actually create things, like news reports, and onto platforms like Facebook and Google that merely aggregate that information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond their impact on advertising, Facebook and the digital revolution it has marked have had other effects on the news industry, Nisenholtz said. <\/p>\n

In 2016, the now infamous Russian intervention in the U.S. presidential election through fake news and Facebook advertisements exposed one of these flaws: News feeds and information aggregating platforms like Facebook often favor sensationalism over truth, Nisenholtz said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis very bad news content<\/strong> is deliberately engineered to get clicks on social networks so ad dollars flow back,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Nisenholtz also said that sensationalist fake news content now appears in news feeds with the same emphasis as more reliable content like that of The New York Times<\/cite>. That, he said, is a danger to journalism.<\/p>\n

Finally, Nisenholtz highlighted the pendulum swing from a media market dominated by a few network television stations and major print publications in the 1980s back to a similarly monopolistic market now dominated by Facebook. <\/p>\n

This continued centralization of power undermines the original goals of the movement towards more diverse mass media, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t fight to open up<\/strong> the means of mass communication only to have it be co-opted by a few people in Silicon Valley,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a good outcome for our society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having laid out his concerns about the state of digital media, Nisenholtz proposed solutions. <\/p>\n

He said Facebook must work hard to regain public trust following the 2016 election and its privacy scandals since then. <\/p>\n

Conversely, however, he added that consumers should learn to better identify fake news in their news feeds while investing their money in paid subscriptions to reliable publications to support the industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Zuckerberg\u2019s philosophy seems to be to move fast, break things, apologize and repeat,” he said. “It\u2019s time for you to demand that this behavior not continue.” <\/p>\n

Dakota Antelman is an editor of The Big Red<\/cite> at Hudson High School in Hudson, Mass.<\/em><\/p>\n

More key points fr0m keynote session<\/h2>\n

by Hari Narayanan and Zoe Goldstein<\/h3>\n

When Thomas Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication and former editor in chief of The Miami Herald<\/cite>, introduced Martin Nisenholtz, he emphasized the importance of the press.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t have a democracy unless the information people get is independent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of putting news on paper\u2014you\u2019ll see that go away. But what doesn\u2019t go away is the importance of journalism.\u201d <\/p>\n

After Nisenholtz\u2019s talk, a student asked, \u201cHow should we as a community of informants evolve with the media and remain relevant?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nisenholtz replied, \u201cI don\u2019t think values of journalism have changed at all. The facts. The truth. That doesn\u2019t change. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat has changed is the means of communication. The only way to get good at that is to use it. Learn how to use WordPress. Work with your teachers. Start something online. But the bedrock of this is the values of journalism and that hasn\u2019t changed since [Thomas] Jefferson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among Nisenholtz’s other points:<\/p>\n