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Weekly News Digest

November 26, 2024 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

The Rise of Bluesky

I’ve been covering Bluesky ever since I got my invite in April 2023. I’ve felt the platform has always had promise, especially with features like feeds with custom algorithms and the ability to let users pick their own moderation filters. But for a long while, it didn’t have the critical mass of users that I could follow to make it the first social network I load up every day.

Over the course of this month, that’s changed. It added 700,000 new users in a week. Then, it crossed the 15 million-user mark. This week, CEO Jay Graber said it crossed more than 20 million users and had been adding more than a million users per day.

For more information, read the article.

ALA Readies Court Defense of E-Rate and the Universal Service Fund

More than half of all public libraries each year apply for E-Rate funding to support the broadband capacity needed to serve our communities nationwide. Recent legal challenges threaten this program for libraries and schools as part of the Universal Service Fund (USF) managed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). …

Consumers’ Research has brought suits against the FCC in several appellate courts across the country, alleging that the USF contribution factor is unconstitutional. The 5^th, 6^th and 11^th courts all agreed with the FCC and intervenors in the case and upheld the USF funding system as constitutional. However, in July, upon further review, the 5^th circuit court ruled that the USF is not constitutional.

Now, the case is headed to the Supreme Court, and ALA plans to go to court to defend the USF and the E-Rate program. The court is expected to grant certiorari in November, and amicus briefs will be needed.

For more information, read the article.

News Literacy Project Studies How to Integrate News Literacy Into Schools

To learn about teens’ information behaviors and mindsets, assess the state of news literacy education and identify ways to ensure young people become well-informed, critical thinkers, the News Literacy Project engaged SSRS, a full-service social science and market research firm, to conduct a nationally representative, probability-based online survey of 1,110 teens ages 13-18 in May 2024.

This research aims to inform educators and policymakers as they weigh how to best integrate news literacy in schools—and to help journalists and researchers better understand the needs of young people in this area. This report acts as a comprehensive overview of how teenagers think about, experience and engage with today’s information landscape.

For more information, read the report findings.

Law Library of Congress Debuts Its First Standalone Interactive Map

A newly published legal report, Innovative Technology in Legislatures in Selected Countries, features the Law Library’s first published standalone interactive map. While interactive maps are a key component of many Story Maps and our Foreign Legal Gazette database, this new feature allows users to explore a report’s worth of data in a visually engaging format. This map surveys 89 independent jurisdictions.

For more information, read the blog post.

A Bump in the Road for Clean-Energy AI

A spike in electricity demand from the world’s big data providers is raising a worrying possibility for the world’s climate: a near-term surge in fossil-fuel use.

Utilities, power regulators and researchers in a half-dozen countries told Reuters the surprising growth in power demand driven by the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing is being met in the near-term by fossil fuels like natural gas, and even coal, because the pace of clean-energy deployments is moving too slowly to keep up.

For more information, read the press release.