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September 29, 2018 04:34 pm

New Web Site Will Team Journalists With Programmers

schwit1 shared an article from the New York Times:When 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, Angwin pioneered the work of studying Big Tech's algorithms -- the secret codes that have an enormous effect on everyday American life... Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, 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. Angwin and 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... Angwin, who was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for coverage of corporate corruption, said the newsroom would be guided by the scientific method, and each story would begin with a hypothesis... At the Markup, journalists will be partnered with a programmer from a story's inception until its completion. "To investigate technology, you need to understand technology," said Angwin, 47... Newmark, who splits his time between San Francisco and New York, has for years kept a low profile. But he worries about what he sees as a lack of self-reflection among engineers. "Sometimes it takes an engineer a while to understand that we need help, then we get that help, and then we do a lot better," Newmark said. "We need the help that only investigative reporting with good data science can provide...." Engineers being surprised by the tools they have made is, to the Markup team, part of the problem. "Part of the premise of the Markup is the level of understanding technology and its effects is very, very low, and we would all benefit from a broader understanding," Gardner said. "And I would include people who work for the companies." Larson laments a world where programs handle crucial decisions, and "once they go into production, there's no oversight..." Or, as he says earlier, "Increasingly, algorithms are used as shorthand for passing the buck." The Markup's site promises " a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom" offering independent analysis of how technology is re-shaping everything from what we believe to "who goes to prison versus who remains free." The site's donations page adds that "We strive for fairness and independence and for us, the best way to achieve that is to operate without ads or a paywall." Angwin tells Recode that she grew up in Steve Jobs' neighborhood in Palo Alto, and in a long interview reveals that she learned to program in a fifth grade class that a public-spirited Steve Jobs funded. Now the Times points out that the Markup "will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does."

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