Reporters rely on credible sources. It’s what makes the fourth estate work. But what happens when the line between credible news and fake news blurs – as it does now? A recent study by Pew Research Center on News Use Across Social Media Platforms (2017) shows that the number of people who rely on social media for their news is on the rise. The whole study is worth a read, and no doubt that we will be revisiting it in future posts, but for now let’s focus on Facebook. Facebook

As media becomes more ubiquitous, naturally, we consume (and crave!) more of it. The easier it is to consume, the more of it we want. Perhaps most helpful to this trend is that “the media” now goes where we go via our mobile devices. So it’s no shock that, according to eMarketer data, the average time spent per day with “Major Media - Digital” climbed to 5 hours and 43 minute in 2017 and is expected to reach 6 hours and 1 minute in 2018. Check out the chart below. What is als

We’ve all heard a version of this riddle: A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims "I can't operate on this boy." "Why not?" the nurse asks."Because he's my son," the doctor responds. How is this possible? While outdated (and blatantly sexist – but that’s for another post…), this riddle is all about assumptions. We all have them - but many of them are just wrong. What’

Is there an actor shortage? It seems like there are an awful lot of real reporters who are making appearances in movies and TV shows. While it’s not new to see “real” reporters in the movies, in the age of fake news and “post truth” (the unfortunate choice for the “word of the year” from the folks over at Oxford Dictionaries), all of the sudden it feels icky to see our trusted sources of information shilling for the latest Batman movie (a la Charlie Rose). Sure, it’s fun to s

This election season has brought to light a particularly virulent strain of fake news. It’s true that people promoting fake information is as old as time, but the internet has made it easy for anyone to create social media profiles and websites in order to post whatever they want under the guise of “journalism.” In a disturbing study by BuzzFeed, they found that fake election news outperformed legitimate news on Facebook. Apparently, this is the new normal for news. The debat