Celeste LeCompte – Future of News and Participatory Media https://partnews.mit.edu Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 11 Mar 2015 08:08:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 Backstori.es: A “Previously On” For News https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/05/13/backstori-es-a-previously-on-for-news/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/05/13/backstori-es-a-previously-on-for-news/#comments Wed, 13 May 2015 16:31:52 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=7039 Continue reading →]]> Inspired by “Previously On…” recap sequences on TV shows, Backstori.es is a web-based tool that allows journalists to semi-automatically generate a background explainer video for any news story. In less than 5 minutes, users can generate a list of relevant previous stories (using the current story’s inline links and other structured data), select the headlines and images that matter most, arrange them in a sequence and customize transitions. Backstori.es then automatically creates a short, dynamic explainer video using the Stupeflix API.

Liam Andrew, Sean Flynn, Celeste LeCompte

Following the news is hard. The complicated storylines and expansive casts of characters that animate global economic, political, and military issues can be baffling if you’re not familiar with the ongoing story behind the latest episodes in the news. It’s almost like trying to jump into watching Game of Thrones mid-season.

But wait! There’s a fix for that!

Backstori.es is a “Previously On” for news.

“Explainer journalism” — in the form of conversational, Q&A-format articles, explainer videos, and even whole new news organizations — has been on the rise, helping news readers get up to speed on stories they haven’t been actively following.

Explainers can be great at providing in-depth, evergreen and search-optimized coverage of a story — but they generally cater to more active readers who want to dig into a story’s background. Those readers are likely to skip the hard news and go right for the explainer; many others click away to easier-to-digest news that doesn’t require so much background.

Backstori.es (GitHub) puts video explainers into the news itself, where they’re most useful.

Screen Shot 2015-05-13 at 12.27.34 PM

While explainers are most valuable in breaking news situations, they are slow to produce and difficult to keep up-to-date. Producing them creates more work for journalists or additional costs for the news organizations. Videos, which are increasingly popular online, present additional challenges for many news reporters, who lack the time or technical skills to produce them.

Backstori.es helps journalists quickly produce videos that work like pre-roll sequences for any news article, engaging readers that might not have the time or interest to read through an in-depth explainer. By using the archive, Backstori.es also produces trustworthy content that captures value from a news organization’s previous work.

Here’s how it works, right now:

As we continue to develop this project, we’ll introduce more editing functionality to improve video quality without adding more work for editors.

Here are a few Backstories we made:

1. California adopts unprecedented water cuts

2. Senate Democrats defy Obama on trade agenda

3. Houthi’s agree to five-day cease-fire in Yemen

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/05/13/backstori-es-a-previously-on-for-news/feed/ 3 Is San Francisco’s Hot Housing Market Literally On Fire? https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/04/07/is-san-franciscos-hot-housing-market-literally-on-fire/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/04/07/is-san-franciscos-hot-housing-market-literally-on-fire/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2015 04:11:15 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=6826 Continue reading →]]> This project is a collaboration between David Jimenez, Charles Kaioun, Celeste LeCompte, and Léa Steinacker.

In San Francisco, there is a growing concern about residential fires, which have displaced more than 100 residents from their homes since the beginning of the year. Have there been more big fires? If so, why? We turned to the data to answer the question.

FIRE-in-SFO-draft_3Read on for more background on our analysis.

Analysis: Beware of data!

This should be the warning applied to all datasets and visualization tools. Illuminating and bringing a new perspective with data is key to asserting ideas, but using the wrong dataset or presenting the right one falsely is as easy as discovering new information.

We started working on building fire data from the San Francisco Fire Department and news reports, alongside the San Francisco Public Health Department’s no-fault evictions data. We came up with a nice map overlaying the two datasets:


Dots are fires — the redder the dot, the bigger the fire. The shaded areas on the map show the rate of evictions — the darker the shading, the higher the eviction rate.

You could easily look at these maps and draw the conclusion: more fires happen where there is a lower eviction rate, or there is a higher eviction rate in zones with fewer fires.

But, look more closely, and you’ll see that this conclusion is flawed.

First, the datasets come from different time frames and sources. The published evictions data is from 2005-2010, while the fire data is available from the city 2011-2012 and collected from news reports between August 2014 and the present.

Second, the evictions data is only available by block group over the entire time period; by averaging the data this way, it erases the change and movement of eviction patterns over time.

Finally, causation is a very subtle thing to test — even with good datasets and strong correlation, this is not so easy. I invite you to check this website (http://www.tylervigen.com/) if you don’t trust me.

We aren’t the only ones asking these questions. An online mapping project has attempted to answer some of these same questions with their own data visualization. However, their maps have many of the same problems — and other problems — as those we tested.

But having wrong data and wrong visualization is not solely the fault of the writers — it’s also on the data providers. Aiming for more transparency and informing people is a noble quest, but doing it wrong can lead to disastrous effects such as this one. The San Francisco Fire Department not only stopped publishing its public data after mid-2012 (though you can request it with a 10-day lead time), the data it provided was full of duplicates, unclear, and very difficult to fetch. (I invite you to check the way they do it, a collection of XMLs with incremental data encapsulated in ZIPs… a real pleasure…).

If cities want to embrace open data, they need to find better ways to publish, maintain, and support the information they’re making available.

Updated with revised image, April 8, 2015, 8:45am

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/04/07/is-san-franciscos-hot-housing-market-literally-on-fire/feed/ 1 Previously on …. https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/31/previously-on/ Wed, 01 Apr 2015 03:53:15 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=6710 Continue reading →]]> Entering reporting on an unfamiliar issue or conflict is hard — but engaging the audience in a story mid-telling is something that television writers have faced for years; could we borrow what they’ve learned to help get readers up to speed on news more easily?

You’ve seen it on your favorite television drama. You’ve heard it on Serial. It’s the recap sequence!

For this assignment, I created a “recap sequence” that could be viewed before reading an article about an on-going or developing story. In this case, I started with this piece, “Saudis launch air campaign to defend Yemen government,” published by Al Jazeera on March 25, 2015.

Instead of creating an explainer for just this one story, I opted to try and come up with a way that every story could have a “recap sequence” using just material from the news organization’s archive.

I compiled the contents starting from the original article — published by Al Jazeera on March 25, 2015.

First, I collected all the linked articles (from in text or “related” boxes in the side and bottom margins of the story), pulling linked article data 3 layers deep.

Then, I scraped the images, captions, headlines, and deks associated with each link, using import.io and manual cut and paste.

Next, I organized the headlines chronologically.

I created a series of “cards” in a Google Fusion Table to look at the potential material.

I then pulled all the images, headlines, captions, and deks into an Adobe After Effects composition. Each unique piece of text is displayed for 2-3 seconds, in order, with the associated images whenever possible.

I manually excluded a few ‘related’ feature or opinion pieces, but otherwise tried to see if a relatively “autopilot” approach would yield a passable explainer.

My video editing leaves something to be desired, but personally, I thought it was a quick little way to get some background that helped me understand what was happening in the story!

See what you think!

]]> Here’s What California’s Drought Looks Like https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/17/heres-what-californias-drought-looks-like/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/17/heres-what-californias-drought-looks-like/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2015 03:42:51 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=6518 Continue reading →]]> This is a collaboration between Liam Andrew & Celeste LeCompte. Liam built a tool for collaboratively curating and annotating tweets (using Zotero) that we then used together to create this post. Read on to the bottom for more details!

Amid an ongoing drought, California’s water system is — like this man’s beer — more than half empty.

About 59 percent empty to be exact.

For some around the state, the issue has hit close to home.

But for others, a faltering water supply hasn’t changed much. Today, the California Water Board made another move to try and conserve the state’s dwindling resources.

The new rules target commercial and residential water use, including tighter limits on watering lawns and landscaping, providing water in restaurants, and washing hotel sheets daily for multi-day guests. Urban uses, including industrial ones, typically account for 20 percent of the state’s consumption. This may seem like a small share of the overall water supply, but it’s been a stubborn issue to confront. In part, because what looks like disaster to those in the know looks like a gorgeous, sunny winter day to everyone else.

Dry riverbeds and snowless peaks are a mere backdrop to hiking and outdoor adventures.

This misguided hiker seems to have missed the memo entirely.

our unlimited free water supply #hetchhetchy #yosemite #hiking #backpacking

A video posted by DenieceD (@deniecececil) on

What’s hidden behind these happy Tahoe hikers, though, is a looming disaster.

National Geographic photo editor and executive environment editor Dennis Dimick tweeted this photo.

For these folks, images of the drought have moved into the foreground.

That is on mighty low river. #water dryingofthewest

A photo posted by Carson Blume Photography (@carsonblume) on

Don Pedro Reservoir

Yay, some water! #California #drought

A photo posted by thatch (@thatchmaster) on

Scary how low the water level is at Don Pedro but had a fun night camping out there.

A photo posted by Nate Carlson (@nate_carlson) on

A view of water in Lake Don Pedro during the #CAdrought, as seen from the hwy 120 vista point:

A photo posted by Paul Baca (@paulbaca) on

Hetch Hetchy

As the new rules roll out, grass-free lawns, and #droughtshaming tweets (and their #h2no counterparts) could become increasingly common.

Liam writes:
I was thinking about how to build a tool that balances human curation with the conveniences of automation, especially when you’re a large group of reporters managing a collection of tweets in a breaking or ongoing event. Suddenly Zotero came to mind, as a way to both store and archive a tweet in case it gets deleted, and keep a synchronized, structured database of curated information. Zotero is conveniently open source so it’s customizable and hackable.

Building on an existing single tweet translator and Zotero’s translator framework, I added support for archiving multiple tweets from an index page, via a dialog box.

PastedGraphic-3

I also added additional structure and metadata to the Zotero record, like indexing hashtags. Lastly, I built a new translator that exports these Zotero’d tweets (and any annotations on them) as Twitter embed cards, for easy copy/pasting into WordPress.

PastedGraphic-7

Zotero allows for groups to collaborate on curating and collecting archives (it even recognizes duplicate entries!) You can add any custom metadata fields as well. I would be curious to see additional support for social media in Zotero (e.g. support for capturing Instagram), as I think it could prove a useful research and curation tool for journalists.

Celeste writes:
I really liked the idea of having a tool that we could use to collaboratively collect, vet, and annotate tweets as we were assembling this piece. In practice, it worked great.

Liam and I both scanned a variety of hashtags, search terms, and location-based searches on Twitter and dumped them into a shared archive. I got to work vetting images for originality (i.e., not taken from a news story about the drought) and confirming that the authors were regular people who are experiencing the drought, rather than environmental activists, journalists or politicians.

The California drought was a fairly random event that we grabbed largely because the water board rules were announced during our discussion. It wasn’t an ideal test case, but it was a great way to test out collaborative curation and see how the two-person model for find tweets, vet, and then publish as a collection could work. This was very fast work once the tool was up and running and I think it would be very handy in a real-time publishing environment where fact-checking and annotation were a necessary part of the publishing plan!

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/17/heres-what-californias-drought-looks-like/feed/ 5 Quiz: Do Minimum Wage Laws Work? https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/11/quiz-do-minimum-wage-laws-work/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/11/quiz-do-minimum-wage-laws-work/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2015 07:53:36 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=6429 Continue reading →]]> Last June, the Seattle City Council approved an increase in the city’s minimum wage to $15/hour. The wage increases will be phased in beginning in April of this year, with all businesses required to pay the new, higher wage by 2021.

The new law affects large businesses first, and an international franchise group says the roll-out plan is unfair. As the policy rolls into court this week, it’s fueled on ongoing national debate about how minimum wage laws impact both individuals and the economy.

Test your knowledge about the minimum wage!

I didn’t get as far with this assignment as I’d hoped, since I was teaching myself to use jQuery while making the quiz. This was a very silly idea, and I didn’t get nearly far enough to use any actual logic in the quiz — you can just get a score for now, and there are all other kinds of $&^% problems with it — but I’ll explain where I was headed after the jump.

model

Ideally, when you submit your answers, the quiz should calculate your score and provide you with a “Correct/Incorrect” for each question with a response — and additional information — tailored to how you did on the quiz.

As you can (maybe) see from my diagram, each multiple-choice question has two possible outcomes: you got it right (TRUE), or you got it wrong (FALSE). At the end of the quiz, if you got mostly correct answers, you would be shown a different result than if you got mostly incorrect answers.

My idea was that knowing how a wrong answer fits into the quiz-takers broader pattern of knowledge could give you an opportunity to (a) “grow” their knowledge by linking the right answer to something they may have answered correctly elsewhere in the quiz, or (b) use more directly persuasive language to counter a pattern of misinformation.

And, for a right answer, you’d be able to either (a) build from this right answer to help persuade them on the more controversial or difficult ideas in the quiz or (b) reinforce their position and perhaps expand with new information outside the quiz, making them a better advocate.

Therefore, each quiz question would have 4 possible responses, as shown. In theory, the responses would have attempted to do the following:

Mostly correct Mostly incorrect
Correct answer Reinforce and extend with additional information from outside the quiz. Reinforce and extend with adjacent information from other questions on the quiz.
Incorrect answer Educate using information from other questions on the quiz. Educate with an emphasis on persuasion.

I also considered not giving the “results” as a direct question-by-question response, but rather as an article with multiple variations. Each user might see a version with different paragraphs and/or a different structure depending on their answers — but that was clearly overly ambitious for this week’s assignment. In general, I am interested in the idea of how you can provide multiple versions of a story for users to help them better navigate it.

 

 

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/11/quiz-do-minimum-wage-laws-work/feed/ 1 Protected: The Other Unspeakable Thing: Money https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/04/the-other-unspeakable-thing-money/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/04/the-other-unspeakable-thing-money/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2015 07:06:00 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=6041

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/03/04/the-other-unspeakable-thing-money/feed/ 3 Who Cares About Magazine Beach? https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/24/who-cares-about-magazine-beach/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/24/who-cares-about-magazine-beach/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2015 06:07:01 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=5721 Continue reading →]]> Magazine Beach

Magazine Beach covers 15 acres of open space squeezed between the Charles River and Memorial Drive in Cambridge, near the BU bridge. After a project to restore the historic Powder Magazine building at the site caught the community’s attention a few years ago, efforts have been underway to improve the public park as a whole.

Who cares about the Magazine Beach park process, and who has a say in what will happen as the development plans take shape over the next year?

An ongoing exhibit about the history and future of Magazine Beach has been on display at the Cambridge City Hall Annex since November. A community potluck event attracted a small crowd on Tuesday evening, where I spoke with people about what they hope to see happen.

Meet them here.

 

Notes on the Four-Hour Challenge

I totally failed to meet the four-hour constraint, even though I tried, because of a few false starts:

  • I was planning to embed Instagram images here, forgetting that the WordPress is not self-hosted so it won’t accept embeds using scripts. I spent about an hour trying to get this tool running on my own website, but failed. UPDATED: The issue was that I use HTTPS Everywhere — the WordPress embeds only work with http not https. Stupid!
  • Initially, I was going to the Cambridge City Hall Annex to do a piece about people filing permits — but then I encountered the great exhibit on Magazine Beach and found out about the event. There was one hour of my time, but it was more research than reporting.
  • I got caught up talking to people at the event and stayed longer than I intended — 2.5 hours, instead of 2 sharp.
  • I tried to bolt on an ill-advised visit to Magazine Beach to see who was missing from the event at the Annex — and I’m sure there were many! For example, none of the many pick-up soccer players who use the site were represented except our classmate Melissa, who I told about the event. However, none of the fields or athletic areas had been cleared of snow, so there were no users of the park. The swimming pool and boat house are also obviously closed for the season. There went an hour of my time.
  • My best video is with State Rep. Jay Livingstone, but I can’t get it to upload to Instagram. 🙁 
    UPDATED 2/24: I woke up this morning and found that the video was posted after all (?) so I added it to the stream above.

That said, even in trying to hit the time limit, I felt the limits of real-time reporting.

(1) There wasn’t enough time to real try and bring in voices from those who use the park but weren’t at the meeting, to analyze who was there and why, and so on. That’s why I opted to stick with the videos: the faces and voices I shared here tell their own kind of story about the night.

(2) I had to edit my material down in a less analytical way than I’m used to; I made decisions based on “what can I do right now?” instead of “what’s the most important thing about this story?”

… I’ll probably still try and figure out some ways to create my own Instagram image feed, since it’s something I’d like to do, in general. If I do, I’ll post a link in the comments.

 

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/24/who-cares-about-magazine-beach/feed/ 4 10 Stories I Followed This Week https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/17/10-stories-i-followed-this-week/ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/17/10-stories-i-followed-this-week/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2015 22:10:59 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=5374 Continue reading →]]> This week, I consumed radio, podcasts, a TV show, a movie, books, paper newspapers, some magazines, and lots of online media, including text, video, and other visual media. I also listen to Pandora almost continuously. But here’s a sampling of 10 stories I followed down the rabbit hole — what they were, how I got there, and what I read.

1. David Carr

davidcarrjetblue

David Carr, the New York Times journalist, died on Thursday night, and my personal networks were filled with stories by and about him. I also read through the syllabus he provided for a class and either read or saved many of those stories.

Total sources: 13 media items
Origin: Word of mouth
Primary sources: New York Times, The Atlantic, Boing Boing, Wikipedia
Discovery method: Facebook, Google Search
Shared: No
Discussed: Offline

Comments: I don’t let push notifications into my life. My phone demands enough of my attention as is, so I haven’t added news alerts to my media diet. But people around me have, and David Carr’s death, along with two other stories I read deeply this week (not included here), came to my attention when someone else received a push notification that they thought was worth talking about. The other two examples were the FBI Director’s speech on race and the shooting in Copenhagen.

2. Fast Track Trade Agreements

I was on the New York Times website and saw this headline: “Left and Right Align in Fighting Obama’s Trade Agenda,” which caught my attention. I began digging around and reading more about this.

Origin: New York Times (online)
Total Sources: 9
Primary sources: New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Bill Moyers, EFF, Washington Times, Ukiah Daily Journal, Cleveland.com, Huffington Post
Discovery method: Google Search
Shared: No
Discussed: No

Comments: Google search was a big driver of my media consumption this week, but Facebook is a close second (and, likely, is usually the most critical driver of my consumption). (Here’s the data.) I recently “liked” some news organizations on Facebook to try and get stories that aren’t just New York Times and New Yorker in my feed; according to this, it worked. I read a lot more news from Al Jazeera and the Washington Post than I used to, for example. NYT now makes up just 15% of the media I consumed and the New Yorker just 3% (and here’s this data).

3. Charlie Baker and his Budget

Election 2010: Charlie Baker

I was at the MIT Knight Science Journalism offices last weekend and saw a cover story in the Sunday paper about Baker’s left-meets-right cabinet appointments. I was interested, so read and shared the story. Then, I started reading more deeply about the cabinet appointments, proposed budget fixes, and Baker’s history.

Origin: Boston Globe (print)
Total Sources: 4
Primary sources: Boston Globe, WBUR, Wikipedia, Boston.com
Discovery method: Google Search, Referral Links
Shared: Yes
Discussed: No

Comments: The traditional idea of “impressions” really does seem to matter. The more times I saw a headline, the more likely I was to click on some version of it, and if I saw it in multiple media formats (print and online here, radio and online below), I was most likely to pay attention. 

4. West Coast Port Labor Dispute

I listen to the NPR “hourly news update” on my way to class most mornings, and I heard a tiny story about the West Coast ports closing for a “long weekend” amid labor contract disputes. I wanted to know more and am still frustrated by the coverage I did find. There are lots of big gaps in the coverage.

Origin: NPR News app
Total Sources: 4
Primary sources: NPR (app), New York Times, USA Today, Longshore and Shipping News
Discovery method: Google Search, Referral Links
Shared: No
Discussed: No

Comments: (a) When I am busy, radio is my go-to news source. I can make dinner, walk to class, take the T, or otherwise get through a jam-packed day while still getting a dose of news. (b) There are some blind spots in my media habits — I didn’t know about this story until this week, despite that that it’s been unfolding for a long time! 

5. No Big Bang?

The Big Bang

A friend of mine shared a link on Facebook claiming that a new paper suggests that there may have been no big bang. I read the article, wasn’t totally sure about the science — which was mostly math. I tagged in another mathematician friend and asked for comments, read some paper summaries, and I now think the new paper has been wrongly interpreted by most coverage.

Origin: Facebook post
Total Sources: 4
Primary sources: Phys.org, arxiv.org, Brian Oberlin (personal blog), Discovery News (video)
Discovery method: Facebook, Referral Links
Shared: No
Discussed: Yes

6. Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber’s Resignation

kitzhaber

Oregon’s four-term governor, John Kitzhaber, has been embroiled in an ethics scandal with his fiance (a woman I used to interview about clean energy topics when I worked in Oregon). I saw a headline that he was resigning on the Longshore and Shipping News, above, and Googled for more information. I leaned on friends for more local perspective and links.

Origin: Referral link from website
Total Sources: 5
Primary sources: Statesman Journal, New York Times, OregonLive, Longshore and Shipping News
Discovery method: Facebook, SMS, Google Search
Shared: Yes
Discussed: Yes

Comments: I was surprised by the ways that “dark social” played a role in my week. Sharing links in SMS, chat, and email helped me get information from people who were closer to a story in some way.

7. Gendered Language in Teaching Evaluations

classroom

I clicked through on a friend’s Facebook post about this visualization, and I enjoyed seeing what I could find. I shared it on Facebook and several of my academic friends re-shared the post, keeping it top of mind for me all week. I found a link to the New York Times writeup of it to share with a friend who asked for a link to more commentary on the topic.

Origin: Facebook
Total Sources: 2
Primary sources: Ben Schmidt’s data viz (personal website), New York Times
Discovery method: Facebook
Shared: Yes
Discussed: Yes

Comments: I’d like to stop making the NYT my default news source when I send links to others. There must have been other good write-ups; this was just laziness!

8. BoSnow

bosnow

Who could not end up following this story? This is one that was entirely “pushed” to me through social media.

Origin: Facebook, Instagram
Total Sources: 5+
Primary sources: Facebook, Instagram, Washington Post, WBUR, Boston Globe
Discovery method: Instagram (app), Facebook
Shared: Yes
Discussed: Yes

Comments: Social media sharing is easiest for me when it’s mobile-friendly, but I prefer to write thoughtful posts on desktop. More than half of things I shared this week, I shared from my laptop, even though I spent several days away from my computer. 

9. Treadmill Desk

I have a group of friends who are constantly talking and joking about standing desks and walking desks. One of them emailed out a NYMag.com article claiming that they don’t work. I read the article, clicked through to read the study. I delighted in debunking the article — particularly the headline, which was just WRONG — and added a comment.

Origin: Email
Total Sources: 3
Primary sources: NYMag, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, The Onion
Discovery method: Email, Referral Links
Shared: Yes
Discussed: Yes

10. San Francisco’s Development Snarl

Copyright Trey Ratcliff All Rights Reserved

I think and talk a lot about the development challenges facing San Francisco right now. A friend posted an article about supply and demand in housing; he tagged me in to the conversation because he thought I would disagree. I had a interesting discussion in the comment thread with the group of folks on which we found some common ground…. but I was also horrified by some of what was said. Very interesting, and part of a longer ongoing discussion over weeks and months.

Origin: Facebook
Total Sources: 2
Primary sources: Planetizen, Thrillist
Discovery method: Facebook notifications
Shared: No
Discussed: Yes

Comments: I love having discussions with people on Facebook, and I’m always surprised by who shows up and what’s said. The San Francisco development conversation, gun control, and Ferguson have been very rich discussions, in particular. So grateful for having it as a tool for getting outside my daily bubble; having a long list of friends from different parts of (and times in) my life really helps. 

Read more

Here’s a chart of the various news media sources (excluding a few paper-based materials) and a calendar of my media consumption, as well. If you want to see all the things I looked at, and my notes on why, on what device, what I did with it, etc., well: all the embarrassing details are here.  I kept a record of my media consumption using Chrome History, Pocket, Evernote, RescueTime, and hand-written notes about radio, paper and Kindle-based media consumption.

 All images courtesy Flickr users under Creative Commons license.

]]> https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/02/17/10-stories-i-followed-this-week/feed/ 1