Kids, now do you understand how profitable classified advertising used to be for newspapers?
And Craigslist is, for the most part, free.
Enough digression, on to investigation.
From the New York Times, Sept. 23:
The Markup, dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society, will be led by two former ProPublica journalists. Craig Newmark gave $20 million to help fund the operation.
When the investigative journalist Julia Angwin worked for ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization became known as “big tech’s scariest watchdog.”By partnering with programmers and data scientists, Ms. Angwin pioneered the work of studying big tech’s algorithms — the secret codes that have an enormous impact on everyday American life. Her findings shed light on how companies like Facebook were creating tools that could be used to promote racial bias, fraudulent schemes and extremist content.Now, with a $20 million gift from the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, the data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be The Markup’s executive director. Ms. Angwin and Mr. Larson said that they would hire two dozen journalists for its New York office and that stories would start going up on the website in early 2019. The group has also raised $2 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and $1 million collectively from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative.Ms. Angwin compares tech to canned food, an innovation that took some time to be seen with more scrutiny.“When canned food came out, it was amazing,” said Ms. Angwin, who will be the site’s editor in chief. “You could have peaches when they were out of season. There was a whole period of America where every recipe called for canned soup. People went crazy for canned food. And after 30 years, 40 years, people were like, ‘Huh, wait.’“That is what’s happened with technology,” Ms. Angwin said, calling the 2016 election a tipping point. “And I’m so glad we’ve woken up.”The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does....
...MUCH MORE
