Author: Ben Lyons

Facebook v. Science

By BEN LYONS / Social media have helped us cocoon ourselves into comfortable ignorance of “the other side” — so goes the prevailing notion of the last few years, since Facebook has been king. A team of researchers at Facebook published an article Thursday that claimed to detail how much the site contributes to

Periscope’s promise and peril

By Ben Lyons / Live streaming is pushing further toward the mainstream, but hurdles remain. With Twitter's March acquisition of the mobile application Periscope (launched a few weeks after its main competitor, Meerkat), live streaming is now more accessible to both streamers and viewers. The riots in Baltimore apparently have offered Periscope a journalistic coming

Michel Martin urges journalists to tell the uncomfortable truth

By BEN LYONS / “Journalism matters because we have the responsibility to inform readers of the truth of their world, even when they don’t want us to." That was the message Michel Martin, host of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” and journalist of more than 25 years gave guests at Gateway Journalism Review’s First Amendment

Ebola reminds us perception is reality

As with other noisy public health topics, covering the ongoing Ebola crisis has posed several challenges. Journalists must have the facts right, of course, or risk irreparable damage to public understanding of the disease. But they also must decide how to deal with the myths others have unleashed. Is it better to raise the ghosts

Revisiting the comments section: Can it be fixed?

BY BEN LYONS// When technological optimists began talking about the Web’s democratizing potential in the 1990s (and earlier), they were excited about not only bringing more diverse information to wider audiences at lower costs, but crucially, the Web as a “writeable,” many-to-many medium. Although there is a certain amount of myth to that out- look,