Clinkers

• Hello and welcome to the News Integrity Initiative, a $14 million effort aimed at combating declining trust in the media and advancing news literacy that will be administered by CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and funded by Facebook, Mozilla, the Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, the Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, AppNexus, Betaworks and Craig Newmark. As Benjamin Mullin reports for Poynter, the effort will “conduct research, plan events and undertake projects that help people make informed decisions about what they read and share online.”

• This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on how Waorani communities in the Amazon in Ecuador are using open-source tools to collaboratively map their own territory.

• Here’s the schedule for this year’s TICTEC (The Impact of Civic Tech) conference, taking place April 25-26 in Florence, Italy.

• Someone in the Trump Administration told Axios editor-in-chief Mike Allen that they saw the Trump White House as being in “beta,” like the “iterative process of designing software,” and Jen Pahlka, Code for America’s founder, writes in protest that “I don’t know if this bizarre application of agile methodologies is a farce or frighteningly effective.”

• Trump watch: Here’s an excerpt of the Financial Times interview with President Trump:

  Q: When I talk to CEOs in this country . . . half of them are saying ‘yes, this is great, we have confidence coming back’, and half of it is ‘God, what happens if he tweets about us and our stock goes down’. / Trump: Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here . . . I have over 100m [followers] between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Over 100m. I don’t have to go to the fake media. / Q: Do you regret any of your tweets? / Trump: I don’t regret anything, because there is nothing you can do about it. You know if you issue hundreds of tweets, and every once in a while you have a clinker, that’s not so bad. Now my last tweet, you know the one that you are talking about perhaps, was the one about being in quotes wire tapped, meaning surveiled. Guess what, it is turning out to be true . . . 

• Think Progress editor Judd Legum reminds us that while there is so much attention on the unanswered questions raised by the many ties between Trump campaign staff (and family) and various Russian actors, in the meantime “Trump’s use of the presidency to personally enrich himself is getting less attention that it otherwise would.” For one thing, he’s spent nine straight weekends at one of his Trump-branded properties, using tax dollars to pay for all his trips.

• Curious about all those Trump Administration financial disclosure reports that were filed late Friday? Here’s a Google Drive with all of them.

• Employees of the Department of Energy’s Office of International Climate and Clean Energy have been told that they should stop using the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction” or “Paris agreement” in written communications, Eric Wolff reports for Politico.

• Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell reports on how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner responded when Wiley Cerilli, a start-up founder, decided to tell Kushner that he was no longer welcome to be an early stage investor in his company. For Kushner, it was an opportunity “to exfoliate.”

• Opposition watch: A survey of 28,000 subscribers to the anti-Trump Daily Action text message alert service by Lake Research Partners finds that 86 percent are women.

• Complaints about sexual harassment by former Bernie Sanders staff Arturo Carmona, who is now running for Congress in California, have broken into the open thanks to the Misogyny Leaks twitter account, and a courageous Medium post by a Sanders campaign colleague of his, Masha Mendieta. Many former Sanders staffers have now signed an open letter calling on leaders of the progressive community to withdraw their endorsements of Carmona.

• Crypto-wars, continued: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now backing off its charge that Verizon had begun implementing spyware on its users with Android phones.

• Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who styles himself as the representative of Silicon Valley, wants to vastly expand the earned income tax credit for the bottom 20 percent of Americans, to compensate them for the stagnation in their wages going back to 1979, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired.

• What sharing economy? Here’s how Uber uses behavioral science to manipulate its massive non-worker workforce of drivers into working harder and longer, as reported by Noam Scheiber in the New York Times.

• Attend: The Theorizing the Web conference is this Friday and Saturday here in New York City.

• Apply: The Membership Puzzle Project, run by NYU professor Jay Rosen and co-funded by the Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund, is looking to hire a research director.

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