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For the first time since the beginning of the year I have some quiet time to reflect and write.  I feel like the end of 2020 and early into the new year, there was a deluge of stimuli on the daily.  Between traditional press and social media, something was always buzzing somewhere. There were cases…

We live in a society that cannot seem to come to an agreement on what is truth and what are lies. People are seeking out stories that back up their beliefs rather than seek out the truths which may undermine those beliefs. We particularly see this on social media, but there are other sites out there which pass themselves off as local news organization which is really just biased sources designed to play upon the needs of people to have their “truths” backed up with like-minded articles. We asked Dave Boitano, a veteran reporter and creator of Science In View, and Loyd Auerbach, an experienced newscaster, author, and Knowledge & Research Consultant for LexisNexis, to come on the show and discuss the current state of news at the local levels in the US.  While the current situation may seem unique to the 21st Century, there are actually parallels to a previous news era over a hundred years ago. Boitano and Auerbach help explain those similarities, and how information professionals, and readers of “news content” can protect themselves from sources which attempt to present information from a biased view.

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Information Inspirations

Just because you may have access to great information doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with it. A current lawsuit brought by the Center for Workplace (CWC) against the Labor & Employment firm of Littler is an alleged example of this. CWC claims that a couple of lawyers illegally took their Intellectual Property and claimed it as their own. Now there’s an ongoing $1.65 million lawsuit to take it back. Librarians and Information Professionals can use this example to remind others of the limitations of how we can license and use information properly.

Apparently, a reporter may give up their writing, but they won’t give up their podcast. A recent episode of Press Box talks about the Substack model where readers pay directly for content, and writers like Matt Yglesias split from writing for Vox and publish on Substack.

There are a couple of other podcast episodes that we touch on in this episode. The bias of local news isn’t just a right-wing or just a left-wing concept. To learn more on this topic check out The NY Times’ The Daily episode on Brian Timpone’s Metric Media Brand (A Partisan Future for Local News?) and Freakonomics Podcast episode on Tara McGowan’s ACRONYM Digital Media (Why the Left Had to Steal the Right’s Dark-Money Playbook.)

On a side-note, Loyd Auerbach’s book, Near Death, was released recently.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

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Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 95 – Spotting Bias and Politicization of Local News Sources – Loyd Auerbach and Dave Boitano

LexisNexis representatives are sending out notices that they are now the exclusive provider of The New York Times content for the legal market. For those of you that are keeping score, this adds to LexisNexis’ exclusive content with Factiva (which includes The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service), and ALM content. It would…

The saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The same could be said of information/media/current awareness in a law firm. We can lead our lawyers to the content but there is no way to ensure they read …or is there?

We are currently in the process of…

Recently, I had a unique experience of being privy to “insider information” on a hot-topic issue that ran on the front pages of major newspapers across the country. In a way, watching news story after news story come out, it was kind of like being in the middle of a sausage factory, watching it all…

I received a call on Monday afternoon telling me that a friend of the family had been killed while crossing a busy intersection near my house. I tried to find out what happened through the local media, but all I could find from the reporters was a statement that a woman was struck and killed…

Seems there are a lot of “First To Market” believers running news aggregators. That became apparent when not one, not two, but three different news aggregators launched “beta” versions of their products to the public this week. I’ve been playing with two of the aggregators – Google News Timeline and NewsSift. The third product,…

The AP announced yesterday that it was going to take “all actions necessary” to stop ISPs from pirating news content and streaming it across their sites, raising copyright concerns about the terms of “fair use”.

In an attempt to save their tumbling profits, hold off bankruptcies and defend their current business models, the newspapers are…