Make Sense of the Infosphere with Prism Metanews
Refract the jumble of your news feed into its constituent parts.
Americans who want to be tuned in to what is happening in their communities and around the world — you, your loved ones, and basically everyone you know— make choices every day about what information to take in to help make sense of it all. Some of these choices, for example to follow a page or subscribe to a newsletter, are purposeful. Their consequences may carry over to future weeks or even years. Others, you make in the moment. You may not even notice it happening, or it could seem to carry little significance. Consider, though, the sheer number of such choices in a given day, and even when they are small it adds up to a sizeable chunk of worldview that became yours that day.
Just as you are what you eat, your habits with regard to the consumption of news, media, and other forms of information determine how healthy will be your understanding of reality. There are few things in life as important as the quality of what you allow into your brain. The reward that follows commitment to healthy habits is almost immeasurable.
But of course you know this! That’s why you spend precious time reading the news, and prioritize quality journalism, and remain on watch for nonsense assertions that deserve to be rejected. It is why you are here, curious about this “Prism Metanews” thing.
Despite your best efforts, however, something is missing. Many news sites are in it more for the clicks than to help their readers contextualize and comprehend current events. Even established, traditional, and generally reputable media organizations sometimes make editorial decisions around anticipated effect on viewers’ emotions, which boosts ratings, or to answer to their owners’ ideologies, or both. The wire services and most major networks have introduced fact-checking and misinformation beats in recent years, but these segments often feel like isolated additions, grafted unnaturally onto the rest of the programming. Critically, and as a result of journalism education that teaches reporters that they are never the story, very few news organization address the hidden filter of news organizations themselves: how players in the information ecosystem face incentives that can lead them to hinder, rather than help, news consumers’ understanding.
And this, as you may have guessed, is where Prism Metanews comes in. “Meta” because we concern ourselves and our audience with that hidden filter. Our offerings speak not just to the substance of what is being reported, but to the ways that substance is transformed by media companies, social media platforms, and other intermediaries before it reaches you. Unlike any other media company, we have built an anti-misinformation ethos and commitment to improving media literacy directly into our business model — from the ground up, not as an afterthought. We believe that to get ahead of misinformation as a society, we need to embed media literacy mindsets, consistently and over time, into the habits of individuals. We do not believe this can be accomplished in the classroom alone, but that it must be learned by doing, every day, with real content.
In the same way that a photography magazine is likely to have been founded by people with a passion for the art and science of taking pictures, Prism is owned and operated by people who are committed to and have experience in, and a passion for, combating misinformation. You would expect the photography magazine to have excellent pictures. You can similarly expect us to hold our work to a high standard of accuracy, context, and sense-making.
Thank you for giving Prism a look. We hope you’ll make us a regular part of your information diet and gain confidence in your ability to navigate the infosphere and sift the good from the bad. Together, we can help move America that much further to safety, away from the abyss of misinformation. Toward a brighter future, where all can debate the best solutions to our shared problems based on a shared reality that is built on objective facts.
We look forward to you being part of Prism. Please also…