Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest

Address — don’t sidestep — health misinformation to debunk falsehoods, study finds

“Don’t be afraid to tackle misinformation head on. It’s important that people speak out, and you can repeat [misinformation] and then debunk it.” By Shraddha Chakradhar.

A rose is a rose is a rose, but please, please make it clear to your readers what a “subscriber” is

Do you mean “people who pay a news company hundreds of dollars a year”? Or “email addresses we have in a spreadsheet somewhere”? By Joshua Benton.
Wirecutter’s union staffers will strike from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday
What We’re Reading
Slate
The baffling, bizarre story of Fake Oxford →
“A group of American teenagers went looking for old-world excellence. They got a different kind of education.”
Reuters / Byron Kaye and Renju Jose
Australia’s richest person will help small publishers strike deals with Google and Facebook →
“The Minderoo Foundation, owned by Andrew Forrest, chairman of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group, plans to help 18 small publishers by applying to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on their behalf so they can negotiate together without breaching competition laws.”
Twitter / Stephen Crockett Jr.
“How to murder a Black website” →
A thread by Stephen Crockett Jr., who is leaving his position as senior editor of The Root.
Columbia Journalism Review / Amanda Darrach
The persistence of The Saturday Evening Post →
“His main challenge in reviving such pieces is the edit. Most contemporary magazines do not publish the ten- to fifteen-thousand-word pieces the Post ran in the 1940s.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Stat says it will have 80 employees by the end of this year →
That’s up from about 50 employees at the end of 2020.
Digiday / Sara Guaglione
TikTok taps BuzzFeed to produce the first sponsored weekly live shows on the platform →
“‘I Made This’ is the first series to come out of the deal. Coming from BuzzFeed’s cooking vertical Tasty, the eight-part series features live cooking videos for different events and holiday celebrations, such as Friendsgiving, a tailgate party, date night, Diwali and Hanukkah, and stars in-house and independent creators that BuzzFeed works with.”
The Verge / Kim Lyons
Twitter introduces aliases for contributors to its Birdwatch moderation program →
“The company said contributors in the pilot Birdwatch program ‘overwhelmingly voiced a preference for contributing under aliases. This preference was strongest for women and Black contributors.'”
The New York Times / Andrew Higgins, Adam Satariano, and Jane Arraf
How fake news on Facebook helped fuel a border crisis in Europe →
“Researchers said smugglers openly shared their phone numbers and advertised their services on Facebook, including video testimonials from people said to have reached Germany successfully via Belarus and Poland.”
The New York Times Company
The New York Times is expanding “The Morning” newsletter to 7 days a week and has hired Vox’s German Lopez →
“German will enable us to expand The Morning to seven days a week early next year (and we’ll have more to say about the details soon). The Morning’s new weekend editions will immediately become among The Times’s largest platforms.”