Research

The 2018 edition of Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) focuses on local access models, specifically, community networks as self-organised, self-managed or locally developed solutions for local access, based on the conviction that one of the keys to affordable access is giving local people the skills and tools to solve their own connectivity challenges. Instead of buying an access service from a large corporate entity, community networks allow community members to self-provide and share infrastructure.

Wall Street analysts are doing data differently. Banks for years have crunched data on company earnings, price targets and other mundane metrics for clients who might use the information to make investing and trading decisions. Now they are pulling data from social-media sentiment, geospatial mapping and other unorthodox sources. They are also increasingly making their data feeds available directly to clients, without the surrounding research notes that often go unread.

Many US voters in a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll, including pluralities of both Democrats and Republicans, said they’d like to see the next Congress make it a top priority to pass measures that better protect consumer data, outweighing other more partisan concerns such as efforts to codify network neutrality and addressing allegations of political bias and censorship on social media.

A majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups are YouTube adopters, with younger Americans standing out as especially avid users of the site. A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that these users are turning to YouTube for much more than entertainment. Roughly half of YouTube users say the platform is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they’ve never done before. That works out to 35% of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for.

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right?

Pennsylvania State University researchers rounding the bend on a year-long study of broadband access in rural Pennsylvania are finding that speeds are even slower than previously thought. Bradford County, on the NY border in Northeastern PA, has slow connectivity speeds, but according to the most recent map available from the Penn State study, it's not among the worst.

Americans living in "news deserts" with few or no local news outlets may be in a bind now that it's time to vote in the midterm elections. Fewer and fewer reporters are employed by the papers that typically cover community and state-level races. More and more of the papers are going out of business altogether. As a result there is less vetting of candidates and more confusion about what's even on the ballot. Americans have new tools in their hands -- cell phones with access to Facebook and other websites -- but social networks don't fill the void left by local reporters.

Newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than US workers overall. There are signs, though, of a turning tide: Younger newsroom employees show greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity than their older colleagues, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data. More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees – those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting and internet publishing industries – are non-Hispanic whites, according to the analysis of 2012-2016 American Community Survey data.

There’s even more phony or misleading political news circulating on social media than there was in 2016, according to a new University of Oxford report that casts doubt on tech companies’ attempts to crack down on disinformation ahead of the midterms. The report also found that social media users were more apt to share “junk news” than what researchers considered “professional content,” which includes news from established media outlets and information from the government, academics or political candidates.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted over the past fractious, violent week shows a majority of voters think that President Donald Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it since he took office in 2017 — but that the national news media are even worse. Just 3 in 10 voters, 30 percent, said President Trump has done more to unite the country, compared with 56 percent who said he’s done more to divide it. Even more voters, 64 percent, said the media have done more to divide the country, while only 17 percent say they have done more to unite it.