Twn 0717

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TWN

THE WASHINGTON NEWSPAPER

Woodward remembered for his courage Page 4

July 2017

Journal of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association

UFO celebration looks to the sky Nisqually Valley News sponsors encounter of the festival kind By Fred Obee Celebrating local history is something lots of community newspapers do, and in Yelm, that means cranking up the festival machine to celebrate the first major sighting of UFOs in Washington’s skies. “Pilot Kenneth Arnold, flying from Chehalis Wagar to Yakima on June 24, 1947, upon landing said he saw nine shiny ‘flying saucers’ zipping past Mount Rainier at speeds he estimated of 1,200 miles an hour,” Nisqually Valley News Publisher Michael Wagar said. “This resulted in nationwide headlines and is credited as the first UFO sighting of the modern era.” To memorialize the event, the paper is launching the first ever UFO Festival and Cosmic Symposium July 2830. The festival will include live music, vendors, contests and a three-day symposium of UFO experts giving presentations. Yelm and the Nisqually Valley News offices are about 45 minutes southeast of Olympia in the rich valley

of the Nisqually River and in the shadow of Mount Ranier. Yelm is a bustling town of 6,800 people, a mix of old time residents and new arrivals seeking a somewhat more affordabe house than is available in Olympia or Tacoma. The News is published every Friday and a shopper going to 23,000 people is delivered at midweek. For people who have worked in open newsrooms and ad departments their whole careers, the first thing you notice at the NVN is everyone has their own private office. Wagar said that at first some people shared the larger offices in the suite of offices on two floors, but as it worked out they actually had extra rooms that weren’t being used, so he assigned offices to each person, a move that proved popular with the staff. For meetings, there is room to gather in Wagar’s office and in a small lunchroom downstairs. The city’s name, according to legend, is an anglicized version of a Native American word that described shimmering heat waves rising from the natural prairie in the river valley. The valley itself was an early trade route, first for See NVN, Page 2

This photo of a skydiver in a wingsuit won Lloyd Mullen of the Shelton-Mason County Journal a second place in the color portait category in Group 3 in the 2016 WNPA Better Newspaper Contest. This year’s contest is being judged by the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Associaiton.

Fake news is a booming business with discounts for repeat buyers It turns out fake news is a big business. According to a report circulated by the Nieman Journalism Lab, if you want to discredit a journalist it costs just $55,000. 100,000 real people’s signatures on a Change.org petition? $6,000. And those Chinese “soft articles” can be gotten for as little as $15. The folks at security software company Trend Micro studied Chinese, Russian, Arabic/Middle Eastern, and English marketplaces and found that “everything from social media promotions, creation of fake comments, and even online vote manipulation [is] sold at very reasonable prices. Surpris-

ingly, we found that fake news campaigns aren’t always the handiwork of autonomous bots, but can also be carried out by real people via large, crowdsourcing programs.” The report, “The fake news machine: How propagandists abuse the internet and manipulate the public,” is impressively detailed and researched, featuring price lists in multiple languages and case studies from several countries. The Russian forum SMOService, “offers a wide range of services that can also come with bulk discounts (up to 55%) and all-in-one VIP bundles.” Some of its notable features include

“populating groups with live accounts and bots, support for more platforms (Telegram, Periscope, and MoiMir), friend requests, dislikes, making a video trend on YouTube, hidden services for VIP users, geolocation-specific services, and 24/7 customer support.” “By now it should be very clear that social media has very strong effects on the real world,” the paper’s authors write. “It can no longer be dismissed as ‘things that happen on the internet.’ What goes on inside Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms can change the course of nations.”


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