donal brown

With a dubious record of milking newspapers they acquire, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital is setting its sights on Gannett Co., owner of USA Today and scores of local newspapers. Their newspaper subsidiary Digital First likes to cut jobs and in the case of the Denver Post, it reduced staff from 200 to 100 in eight years and then called for another cut of 30 jobs. (Bloomberg News, January 14, 2019, by Gerry Smith)

In 2014 former U.S. intelligence agents started working for the United Arab Emirates to spy on those critical of the monarchy. They used modern espionage equipment to surveil human rights workers, journalists and political opponents including ISIS. But the former agents soon found themselves serving UAE intelligence services by spying on U.S. citizens, a practice that caused many of them to resign. (Reuters, January 30, 2019, by Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman) The FBI is

A University of Michigan researcher says fears of fake news influencing the 2016 presidential election were overblown. Professor Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues found that only a small number of people read fake news relating to the election and that fake news sites were just two percent or less of an average person’s online news consumption. Public policy researcher Kathleen Hall Jamieson published a book last year concluding that Russian fake news likely influenced the

California open government roundup: Resistance to new police transparency law The Berkeley City Council reversed itself after first refusing to release pre-2019 police personnel records under the recently passed SB1421, the state’s new police transparency law. It’s not known how the Berkeley police union will respond, but other unions are arguing SB1421 is not applicable to pre-2019 records. (San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2019, by Lauren Hernández and Sarah Ravani) San Diego’s KPBS filed a