Quartz launches obsession on propaganda

Financial news site Quartz will launch a new obsession on propaganda on Saturday.

Instead of describing the world in terms of a set of fixed subject-matter categories, such as the “beats” at traditional newspapers, Quartz see it as a collection of evolving phenomena. It calls those obsessions, and they include things such as the future of finance, business of space, machines with brains (artificial intelligence and automation), China’s internet, and Europe’s survival.

Quartz’s reporting will focus on tracking propaganda techniques, from the old-fashioned use and abuse of language to the deployment of bots, online crowds, and personalized targeting on social media, as well as the latest scientific research on persuasion, belief, and how information and ideas are spread.”

This Saturday, Quartz senior editor Gideon Lichfield will formally launch the obsession with an essay that introduces the obsession and why Quartz is pursuing it in its reporting.

“In the politics of the past year we’ve seen old-style propaganda techniques, of the kind Mussolini and Stalin would have recognized, joining forces with these very 21st-century methods of persuasion born of modern technology,” Lichfield said. “We—meaning citizens and the media—still haven’t learned how to treat the information that’s reaching us in these new ways. That’s why I think it’s important to for us to look at how it’s being created.”