Worth Reading, Aug 27, 2012

Hello again. After a summer break (including the launch of my colleague Fred Garcia’s book The Power of Communication), the Worth Reading updates are back, with highlights of items that have caught our interest in the last week or so.

• Journalism and politics: The topic of politics is inescapable as we head into the heated fall political season, but a couple of notable pieces caught our eye this week. From Nieman Journalism Lab, an inside look at how decisions are made and the process works at PolitiFact. Then, from Jay Rosen, a discussion of the current divide between “‘You’re not entitled to your own facts.'” vs. That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad.”
• Wikipedia and breaking news: This interesting ethnographic study summary looks at  “How Wikipedia Manages Sources for Breaking News,”
• Gender diversity and corporate performance: A Credit Suisse Research Institute report, “Gender diversity and corporate performance,” looked at various measures of diversity and performance, including stock market and financial performance. From a global view, the report analyzed “the performance of close to 2,400 companies with and without women board members from 2005 onward.” They found that, “over the past six years, companies with at least some female board representation outperformed those with no women on the board in terms of share price performance.”
• Social media and risk management: Another excellent report from the Altimeter Group, on “Guarding the Social Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management.” They found that “organizations need to be more proactive in managing social media risk.” The report looks at types of social media risks and risks by platform, and then outlines concrete steps for organizations to identify, assess, manage and monitor those risks.