Press Corps - World Model United Nations

surface articles that do not benefit it—consumers
and experts alike have no solid reason to believe
that. in fact, the truth is far more mundane. it has
everything to do with the nuanced competition of
Google’s economic desire to give us what we want,
versus the public sphere’s mandate to give us what
we need.
To build a product that more closely aligns with
users’ expectations, Google has spent years modifying
Google may be the biggest public discourse gatekeeper in the
history of communication.
its algorithms to give more weight to results that
meet certain qualifications within an individuals’
personal context, ranging from the obvious, like
language and geographic region, to the esoteric, like
browsing history and Internet service provider. Even
when not logged into a Google account, the service
still uses dozens of signals to determine the results
it serves. This matters because personalization, by
design, returns information specific to the individual
looking for it. In other words, the more data a user
deposits in Google’s vast repositories, the more likely
Google is to offer results that align more closely to
that user’s apparent mode of thinking. That pattern,
critics fear, creates an echo chamber that blinds users
to alternative perspectives and necessarily weakens
their ability to participate in the public discourse.
Habermas wrote that in the public sphere, in its ideal
definition, “access is guaranteed” to all citizens. 11
Personalization threatens that egalitarian principle by
creating spheres shared only by those of like minds,
with the Google juggernaut mightily guarding the
gate of each.
this information is presented here with an eye
toward both providing background about journalistic
philosophy and fostering a session of critical thinking
about the values each agency at WorldMUN should
adopt. At the beginning of the conference, you
will work with the other members of your agency
to adopt a set of guiding values and group norms,
which will serve the dual purpose of guiding your
journalistic output as well as your team dynamic.
Thinking about the importance of the history of
news proves an irreplaceable component of actually
producing it, for understanding where we are today
provides guidance for where we’ll go tomorrow. The
modern example of Google (or another ad-based
search engine) as a gatekeeper is only an example
of the larger historical trend: that large, powerful
institutions, whether governments or private
corporations, generally impose borders on the public
discourse. As a journalist at WorldMuN, your duty is
to open those confines and add new, under-explored
angles to the discussion. indeed, 2013 presents more
tools to do so than ever in human history.
The Modern Evolution of
Journalism
Social Networks Democratize Journalism
the emergent world of internet journalism has
had the dual effect of illuminating new stars while
blacking out many of the old ones. In broad strokes,
print media has suffered greatly from the rise of free
and online journalistic content. In large part, a lack of
foresight doomed many of these old-world outlets:
many papers in the united States alone failed in the
final years of the last decade because they did not
anticipate the precipitous declines in revenues that
offering their content online for free would cause. On
the one hand, print revenues had flowed plentifully
until that point, and on the other, internet access
had not proliferated extensively enough to yet
give them pause. The survivors of that era, like the
Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—which
announced in July 2012 that subscription revenues for
the first time exceeded those from advertising—have
emerged different institutions, ones that compete
with upstarts with minimal start-up costs and whose
business models were never predicated on the idea
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