Chicago Public Media is building a social network for America's third largest city. Forget AI - this is the thing I'm most excited about in news technology.

An old-time protest song for a new age, with an extra helping of new style

🌡️ Today, I'm happy to launch the "Reuters Climate Monitor," a live data dashboard that aims to track the slow-moving impact of climate change at the speed of the news. You can find it at https://lnkd.in/eYTvYCBD This is the first in a series of steps that Casey Miller and I are taking to supply the scientific context that's too often missing from news coverage of extreme heat. It all started when our executive editor, Simon Robinson, challenged my group to improve our coverage of fast-moving catastrophes. Because most climate data is global in scope, slow to update and centered on the upward creep of arcane statistics, it often has little to add to the coverage of major news events, such as last summer's deadly European heat wave. Our view is that more timely climate coverage requires localized data that is easy to grasp and quick to update. After examining the challenge and consulting the world's leading climate experts, we learned that the solution didn't exist, but that an emerging set of public datasets made it possible. So we took on the task ourselves and developed a system that automatically compares today's weather forecast against the historic record, mapping out temperature extremes before they occur. It'll take its first turn as part of our coverage of heat at the World Cup, and then we'll be looking to apply it to this summer's heatwaves and the potential return of El Niño later this year. My hope is that we can provide data visualizations that help people better understand a changing world, and generate "nut graf" numbers that can lead our text stories by stating clearly the dangers of extreme heat. That's not all. We are brewing up something bigger with Maurice Tamman and company that I'm excited to publish later this year. And Casey Miller and I are on the verge of rolling additional features out of the lab, which I'll be sharing soon. I gave a longer talk about the project at a Reuters Events summit in Boston last month. I've attached a few slides from my deck to this post. As always, please tell me what you think, what sucks and what we ought to do next. | 77 comments on LinkedIn

Summarize your Bluesky feed

Microblog and feed from Aram Zucker-Scharff.

Bonfire’s latest release puts data portability (moving and taking your data with you) and anti-enshittification (avoiding manipulative platform tricks) front and center.

Microblog and feed from Aram Zucker-Scharff.

Microblog and feed from Aram Zucker-Scharff.

Microblog and feed from Aram Zucker-Scharff.

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess. There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make the kind of knowledge we need in this moment, bc what they make are endless streams of atomized stories. And we ordinary people are all out here in the feeds trying to piece it together in our heads.

[Mastodon] Mastodon's legal updates are an important way to support different kinds of communities. It's great to see the Mastodon team grow to support these features. I'd love to see CC-licensed terms of service for communities to use. Those features: * "Mastodon servers already have Server Rules and a Privacy Policy, that owners need to define when they create their instance. There will also now be an optional Terms of Service. To help you get started, we’re providing a generator (based on a template from our own law firm). The effective change date of the Terms of Service will be included, to allow users to review them before taking any action." * "We’re providing the ability for server rules to be translated into multiple languages. This means that the rules which apply to everyone that uses your Mastodon instance, will now be able to be read in different languages, as appropriate for your community." * "We are introducing a new option for server administrators to set a minimum age requirement for user sign-up. When the option is enabled, the Mastodon instance will require a date of birth to be provided when a new account is created. This value will be validated against the minimum age setting, and then discarded." These aren't necessarily the _sexiest_ features, but they protect community owners. Increasingly, as requirements for running sites with user generated content get tighter around the world, these will allow online communities to continue to exist. #Fediverse [Link]