Writing Group 4/2017

Last month I posted what I wrote for March's meeting for the writing group I joined this year at the local library.  This month the prompt was "Review A Magazine Article You Have Read This Past Month" and what follows is what I wrote to read at the meeting today.   I have enjoyed the five gatherings of this group that I have attended.  They are talented writers and have been kind with their comments about my writing. 

Library Writing Group

April 2017

Topic:

Magazine Article Review

The State Library of Ohio offers the ability to check magazines out on electronic devices.  In order to take advantage of this service, a state library card and either a Nook device or a Nook App is required along with an internet provider.  Because of this capacity, I have been able to enjoy a wider variety of periodicals than I would if I purchased them.  For the first time, last month I read an issue of a magazine called Wired.  It is a monthly magazine that is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has been in publication since 1993.  Wired is owned by the media company Condé Nast. The cover of the March issue reads “The News in Crisis” and within its covers are several articles on the many ways the news media is changing.  The first piece is “Saving The New York Times”. Another one is called “The News Media Is in Trouble”.   Also included is “Keeping Up with The Times”.  “Attention Is Our Business” is one of many graphics displays incorporated in this section of the magazine.   “Robots Wrote This Story”, “Black News Matters”, and “Reporters Need Edward Snowden” are other articles covering the news media in Wired last month. But the feature story “Fake News Factory to the World” by Samantha Subramanian is the write up I selected to review.   I chose this item because of the accusations and finger pointing that has been happening from all corners about “fake news” recently. 

The “Fake News Factory to the World” it turns out, according to the article, is Veles, in the Balkan nation of Macedonia.  It is a town of 55,000 people where the average monthly salary is $371.   One 18-year-old young man there dropped out of high school last fall because between August and November he earned $16,000 posting untrue stories on his pro-Trump website.  These stories were shared, often over 800 times, and contained advertisements which paid him for the amount of times his websites were visited.  The wilder the stories he put up meant there would be more shares and more views and more money for him.   His English is poor but he was able to pull the false stories off other areas on the web and copy them.  It made no difference to him if the information was true or false.  It made no difference to him who won or lost the US election.  He only wanted the pocket money to buy a car, cigarettes and drinks at the bar.  This same young man, now that the election is over, has websites that are about health foods, celebrity news, and other things that can generate clicks by people on social media.  There is a six-week class in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, that is available on line with a price tag of $425, where people can learn to generate this sort of income.   But the class is not about posting fake news but instead teaches participants how to create web sites of interest to people with legitimate content that contain the same click bait ads.  Google has pulled its ads since the election but this practice is still going on therefore the presence of other advertisers remain.  One of the foreign teens who posted during our election is quoted in the article as saying that although he experimented trying to do the same sort of thing with the supporters of other candidates, he discovered that Trump supporters shared the fake news quickly and without questioning it, as long as it was sensational, and in that way increased his profits much more  quickly, than the other supporters who searched for proof and credibility of the information prior to sharing.    It is not known how much impact this sort of thing had on our US voters.  The information these foreign young people  posted was already out on the internet.  Their online behavior only made the mis-information much more widely known and read.  It is clear to me from reading this article that as individuals we need to improve our critical thinking skills.  When I went to high school in the 1970s, questioning what we read and using reason to think things through was stressed to us.  When my kids were in school in the 1990s I did not pick up on any emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills.  Perhaps it isn’t till college now that these skills are introduced.  As parents and grandparents, we should foster this ability in ourselves and our families with discussions and direction.  Learning to recognize false information and conspiracy theories verses legitimate news coverage, learning to know the difference between an editorial and factual reporting, and recognizing the various leanings of the articles we are reading or videos we are watching needs to be part of everyone’s knowledge base.