Facebook announced a tweak to its News Feed today that aims to reduce unwanted “spammy” content in user feeds. Good news for readers frustrated by those stories, bad news for the publishers that have been making money by promoting their websites via “clickbait.” But what exactly is clickbait?

@greghoward88 lol clickbait now just means "things I don't personally like"

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 21, 2014

Clickbait is in the eye of the beholder, but Facebook defines it as “when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.” But they won’t be demoting links based on verbal clues.

So how do we determine what looks like click-bait?

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

In other words, if people aren’t reading or talking about your content, soon they might not see it on Facebook at all.

Lots of people assume that sites that pull in huge traffic from social media — like BuzzFeed, for example — achieve those figures by using “clickbait.” But in reality, original content, even in list format, is something people are likely to read and share and comment on, which means Facebook is probably fine with it. Even lower brow sites that try to churn out viral headlines might evade this new News Feed obstacle if they can get people to spend a few minutes on site. As The Awl’s John Herrman points out on Twitter, that doesn’t jive with how people in the media define clickbait.

@kevinroose I think time-on-site favors a lot of stuff that media people equate with "clickbait"

— John Herrman (@jwherrman) August 25, 2014

Facebook doesn’t have any editorial obligation to promote breaking news or think pieces or longform; their obligation, as they’ve repeatedly stated, is to satisfy their users. Apparently, the company feels the best way to determine if users are satisfied is by measuring the length of time they spend looking at something.

Facebook is a platform with enormous power over publishers. If they’re making moves toward time on site as a lead metric, you can bet content strategists across the web are already coming up with ways to hang on to your eyeballs.

One of the most common complaints about social media is about filter bubbles — the idea that, because you choose your own universe of friends or accounts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, you risk cocooning yourself in a world of likeminded perspectives. Conservatives only hear from fellow conservatives, the argument goes, liberals from fellow liberals, and everyone ends up with hardened, more extreme positions. The result: increased political polarization.

But this new paper from NYU’s Pablo Barberá argues that that’s not true. The core of his argument: Social media encourages connections between people with weak ties — not just your best friends, for instance, but also your high school classmates, that guy you met on a business trip who friended you, and the local guy you heard was funny on Twitter. Those people tend to be “more politically heterogeneous than citizens’ immediate personal networks,” which exposes you to more perspectives, not fewer.

I apply this method to measure the ideological positions of millions of individuals in Germany, Spain, and the United States over time, as well as the ideological composition of their personal networks. Results from this panel design show that most social media users are embedded in ideologically diverse networks, and that exposure to political diversity has a positive effect on political moderation…Contrary to conventional wisdom, my analysis provides evidence that social media usage reduces mass political polarization.

This is just one paper, but it adds to a growing body of knowledge that shows that the connection between media consumption and political polarization is much more complicated than conventional wisdom has it. Add this to Alan Abramowitz’s work showing that knowing more about politics correlated with more extreme views on both left and right and Pew’s findings that show viewers of one cable news network are more likely to watch other cable news channels. (In other words, regular Fox News viewers are more likely to watch MSNBC than the average American, and vice versa.) The filter bubble narrative is more complicated than it seems. Barberá:

Contrary to a growing body of work that suggests that the Internet functions as an “echo chamber,” where citizens are primarily exposed to like-minded political views, my findings demonstrate that most social media users receive information from a diversity of viewpoints…I have provided empirical evidence from a panel design showing that exposure to political diversity on social media has a positive effect on political moderation, and that it reduces mass political polarization.

"How Social Media Reduces Mass Political Polarization", my new paper. Comments welcome! http://t.co/SEFovMY3pt pic.twitter.com/n6tRUuyXzo

— Pablo Barberá (@p_barbera) October 20, 2014

The Knight Foundation (disclosure: a funder of Nieman Lab) gives money to a lot of journalism and journalism-adjacent projects. But they often work through a variety of contests and programs that aren’t always clear to outsiders. (Most famously, the Knight News Challenge, which has “news” right there in the name, has lately been funding projects around libraries, online freedom, and open government. Worthy causes all, but often confusing to people who are looking for financial support for their news startup.)

That makes this post by Knight’s Andrew Sherry useful — it outlines the various routes to funding currently available. The three most important to journalism types (emphasis mine):

If you have a news or information idea you want to develop and test, the Knight Prototype Fund may be for you. This Media Innovation initiative provides $35,000 to turn ideas into prototypes. There are several cohorts of winners each year; the most recent winners can be seen here. The next application deadline is Nov. 1…

The Knight News Challenge, which will next open for applications in early 2015, is Knight’s best known way of funding media innovation. Challenges usually have a theme — libraries, strengthening the Internet, Open Gov, networks — and the number in a year may vary. Increasingly, though, we’re emphasizing the Prototype Fund as the gateway for news and information projects…

Separate from Knight’s grantmaking, the Knight Enterprise Fund provides early-stage venture funding for media innovation. The fund invests in for-profit companies that can strengthen the news and information ecosystem. Along with investment, the fund brings Knight’s media industry network and knowledge to the table. The fund is drawn from Knight’s endowment, not its grantmaking budget.

In other words, if you’re a typical Nieman Lab reader, unless you’re a for-profit of the sort that looks for substantial venture capital, the Prototype Fund process is probably the best way to seek funding from Knight. The positive side of that is that the turnaround time is much shorter than the News Challenge used to offer, and the number of projects funded is higher; the downside is that the dollar figures are smaller than the News Challenge used to offer. But a successful Prototype Fund grantee could certainly move up to bigger funding down the road.

Back in May, we told you about how WNYC was using a Twitter Player Card to embed audio into its tweets. It was pretty nifty! But it came with a few technical hiccups:

It’s not a perfect experience. Twitter is all about the stream, scrolling through tweets — it’s not exactly optimized for having the same tweet in front of you while a 16-minute audio clip plays. (On the Twitter iOS app, for instance, the widget is only playable as a separate web page, which both is unattractive and means you can’t look at any other tweets in your stream for 16 minutes.) And I imagine many news orgs would much rather direct traffic to their website than share even more of their content on someone else’s platform.

Well, one of those problems is now solved, with a brand new Audio Card announced today.

With a single tap, the Twitter Audio Card lets you discover and listen to audio directly in your timeline on both iOS and Android devices. Throughout your listening experience, you can dock the Audio Card and keep listening as you continue to browse inside the Twitter app.

In other words, listening to an audio clip in a tweet no longer means you’re stuck staring at the same tweet for the next hour — at least if you’re using SoundCloud and are a pre-cleared partner.

So if you want to catch up on Serial (and you do, that Jay guy is super suspicious), you can listen while scrolling through your timeline:

Episode 4 of @serial is up! http://t.co/uEekJddwcK

— Serial (@serial) October 16, 2014

Twitter says it plans “to make it available to more partners and creators in the future so that many more musical artists and creators will be able to share exclusive, in-the-moment audio to millions of listeners on Twitter.”

If it’s your goal to make audio more sharable — more social, more viral — a better Twitter experience is a pretty big deal.

Apple just announced a brand new iMac with a Retina display — Apple’s term for a display with pixels small enough that they can’t under normal use be detected by the human eye. Retina started on the iPhone, graduated to the iPad, then moved to the MacBook Pro — but now it’s moving to Apple’s giant desktop screens. We’re talking 14.7 million pixels. (The original iPhone had 153,600 — 1/96th as many.)

It looks like a very nice piece of kit, but it’s worth note to publishers because the iMac is probably the single most common computer used by web designers. (I’m typing this on one.) And the downside of a Retina display is that your old website graphics, designed for one-fourth as many pixels, will look a little fuzzy. So a lot of designers will be tempted to replace their existing images with ones 4× as large so they’ll look “right” on their screens. Even more important, their bosses will someday soon get these glorious screens and ask a dev: Why is my website fuzzy on my computer? You saw some of this when the Retina MacBook Pro, but this is the next step. (And of course, non-Apple desktop and laptop computers will continue to get more pixel-dense displays, just as phones and tablets have.)

Bigger images are nice in every way except file size. The weight of the average web page has been on a steady march northward, sitting now more than 15× that of a web page 10 years ago and 50 percent larger than just a year ago. Most of that page weight is images. And this new iMac will push a lot of nice 125K images into 500K bandwidth-cloggers. That’d probably fine on your beautiful new desktop on a fat broadband pipe, but it’ll mean your website will get substantially slower on a phone — just as even more of your audience switches to phones.

This doesn’t have to happen, of course. CSS media queries allow you to serve different images to devices with different pixel ratios. And solutions for responsive images are in various stages of progress. (We use Picturefill all over this site and have been happy with it.) SVG gets better all the time, and icon fonts can solve problems in a pinch. (This book, coming out soon, will tell you what you need to know.)

But those methods rely on coders using best practices, and not everyone does. So watch your site and see if page weight starts to creep up not long after a few large Apple boxes get dropped off in graphics.

“The median page has slowed down by 23% in just twelve months.” Performance findings on top ecommerce sites: http://t.co/DISLu7HCZZ

— Responsive Design (@RWD) October 14, 2014

Apple Announced New iMac That Will Make You Feel Bad About Your Website Graphics

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) October 16, 2014

What he said —> MT @jbenton: Web designers getting the retina iMac will increase the average weight of a web page 300K, minimum

— Adam Schweigert (@aschweig) October 16, 2014

@jbenton it is going to hasten the need for <picture> or some such. /cc @davatron5000

— Travis Swicegood (@tswicegood) October 16, 2014

@jbenton Responsive images can't get here fast enough. In the meantime, picturefill the hell out of that stuff.

— John Hancock (@Hancock_JohnD) October 16, 2014

I’m very happy to point you toward the new group of Visiting Fellows here at the Nieman Foundation, of which Nieman Lab is a part. Regular Lab readers will spot several people who’ve appeared in (or written) stories here in the past. Go here for the full press release; the winners are listed below.

A reminder: The Visiting Fellowship program exists “to invite individuals with promising research proposals to advance journalism to take advantage of the many resources at Harvard and the Nieman Foundation.” And it’s not just limited to journalists: “Those who are welcome to apply include publishers, programmers, designers, media analysts, academics, journalists and others interested in enhancing quality, building new business models or designing programs to improve journalism.”

We’ll open applications for the Visiting Fellowships again next year — watch this space. And if you are a working journalist interested in our year-long fellowships, which are amazing, it’s time to start thinking about applying. The deadline for non-U.S. citizens is December 1; for Americans, the deadline is January 31.

Dean Haddock, director of web and information technology for StoryCorps, will design a system for recording, editing and accessing user-generated interviews online that will extend StoryCorps’ proven interview methodology to the Internet and mobile devices. The project will offer new ways to produce high-quality, well-organized audio content that journalists, communities, families and the public at large can freely use and share.

Melody Joy Kramer, an editor and digital strategist at NPR, will develop a new model for public media membership to include non-financial forms of contributions and use of local stations’ physical space for community building. The goal of the project is to instill a sense of ownership and identity among listeners, allowing them to feel more connected to and invested in public media’s content, work and mission. She will also be working with MIT Media Lab graduate students to investigate new ways for audiences to tag audio.

Donna Pierce, a contributing editor at Upscale Magazine who writes about food in a syndicated column for the Chicago Defender, will research papers at the Harvard University Archives and elsewhere for a publishing project on the migration of African-American cooks and recipes from the South to the Midwest, West and Northeast. She also will work on a companion project to teach journalistic skills to young people through interviews with senior citizens about their food traditions.

Jack Riley, the London-based head of audience development for The Huffington Post UK, will research the future impact of smartwatches and wearable devices on journalism and content. His work at Harvard will include research, interviews, case studies and surveys about product potential and likely adoption, as well as monetization. Riley also will work on a prototype of a smartwatch publishing app.

Freek Staps, the head of the business news start-up NRC Q in the Netherlands, will research a set of issues related to journalism’s digital transformation, including leadership skills, newsroom buy-in and how content producers can work hand-in-hand with reader-oriented departments on the business side of media companies. His goal is to identify best practices in the United States order to introduce them to European markets.

Amy Webb, founder and CEO of Webbmedia Group and co-founder of Spark Camp, will develop a program to reform journalism education by researching and publishing a blueprint that can be adapted within universities. Webb has developed seven key areas for change, as well as new metrics and key performance indicators to measure outcomes, and will spend her time in Cambridge advancing her research.