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1. Transparency, Trust, and Security Needs for the Design of Digital News Authentication Tools

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579534  

   Francis, Errol ; Monroe, Ayana ; Sidnam-Mauch, Emily ; Ivancsics, Bernat ; Washington, Eve ; McGregor, Susan E. ; Bonneau, Joseph ; Caine, Kelly ( April 2023 , Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Americans' trust in news is declining, and authenticity and transparency challenges in digital publishing contexts pose unique challenges to the ability to effectively gratify their information-seeking needs via online media. Cryptographic technologies and web-based provenance indicators have the potential to enhance the trustworthiness and transparency of digital communication, but better understandings of news consumers practices and needs are required to develop practical tools. Through a representative online survey of 400 digital news consumers and 19 follow-up interviews, we investigate how users authenticate and assign trust to news content, and identify specific needs pertaining to news transparency and authentication that could be met by digital news authentication tools. While many users currently rely on political ideology to assess news trustworthiness, we find that users of all political orientations see value in independent provenance and authentication tools for digital news. 

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2. Negotiated Autonomy: The Role of Social Media Algorithms in Editorial Decision Making

   https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i3.3001  

   Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea ; Diakopoulos, Nicholas ( July 2020 , Media and Communication)

   Social media platforms have increasingly become an important way for news organizations to distribute content to their audiences. As news organizations relinquish control over distribution, they may feel the need to optimize their content to align with platform logics to ensure economic sustainability. However, the opaque and often proprietary nature of platform algorithms makes it hard for news organizations to truly know what kinds of content are preferred and will perform well. Invoking the concept of algorithmic ‘folk theories,’ this article presents a study of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 U.S.-based news journalists and editors to understand how they make sense of social media algorithms, and to what extent this influences editorial decision making. Our findings suggest that while journalists’ understandings of platform algorithms create new considerations for gatekeeping practices, the extent to which it influences those practices is often negotiated against traditional journalistic conceptions of newsworthiness and journalistic autonomy. 

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3. Data Flow Maps - Increasing Data Processing Transparency and Privacy Compliance in the Enterprise

   Berkowitz, Jeremy ; Mangold, Michael ; Sharon, Stephen ( May 2017 , Washington and Lee law review)

   In recent years, well-known cyber breaches have placed growing pressure on organizations to implement proper privacy and data protection standards. Attacks involving the theft of employee and customer personal information have damaged the reputations of well-known brands, resulting in significant financial costs. As a result, governments across the globe are actively examining and strengthening laws to better protect the personal data of its citizens. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) updates European privacy law with an array of provisions that better protect consumers and require organizations to focus on accounting for privacy in their business processes through “privacy-by-design” and “privacy by default” principles. In the US, the National Privacy Research Strategy (NPRS), makes several recommendations that reinforce the need for organizations to better protect data. In response to these rapid developments in privacy compliance, data flow mapping has emerged as a valuable tool. Data flow mapping depicts the flow of data through a system or process, enumerating specific data elements handled, while identifying the risks at different stages of the data lifecycle. This Article explains the critical features of a data flow map and discusses how mapping may improve the transparency of the data lifecycle, while recognizing the limitations in building out data flow maps and the difficulties of maintaining updated maps. The Article then explores how data flow mapping may support data collection, transfer, storage, and destruction practices pursuant to various privacy regulations. Finally, a hypothetical case study is presented to show how data flow mapping was used by an organization to stay compliant with privacy rules and to improve the transparency of information flows 

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4. COVID-19 and Housing Security in Remote Alaska Native Communities

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey ; Supple, Laura ; Criss-Carboy, Laura ( November 2023 , Virginia Tech Publishing)

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)

   https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

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5. Evaluating the Inverted Pyramid Structure through Automatic 5W1H Extraction and Summarization

   Norambuena, Brian ; Horning, Michael ; Mitra, Tanushree ( March 2020 , Computational Journalism Symposium)

   The inverted pyramid is a basic structure of news reporting used by journalists to convey information and it is considered a key element of objectivity in news reporting. In this article, we propose the Inverted Pyramid Scoring method to evaluate how well a news article follows the inverted pyramid structure using main event descriptors (5W1H) extraction and news summarization. We evaluate our proposed method on a proprietary data set of Associated Press news articles across breaking and non-breaking news spanning two topics—political and business. Our results show that the method works at distinguishing the structural differences between breaking and non-breaking news. In particular, our results confirm that breaking news articles are more likely to follow the inverted pyramid structure. 

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