#TheRoundupCT is a weekly email newsletter that summarizes Connecticut's best journalism. Delivered every Friday at noon. I led this project with undergraduate journalism students at the University of Connecticut from August 2017-May 2019.

“Local news organizations should become a driving force for better online public discourse, because Facebook and Twitter aren’t cutting it.”. Journalism’s public trust problem isn’t going away. As the war on truth escalates, news organizations are going to have to counterattack on multiple fronts to win back audience trust.

A traditional function of the press in society is to foster discussion and debate on issues of public concern. One of journalism’s democratic responsibilities is to provide forums for public criticism and compromise. That obligation hasn’t disappeared in the digital age. It’s become even more important.

Comments on digital news stories and on social media play an increasingly important role in public discourse as more citizens communicate through online networks. Shanahan's book explains online comments as the digital iteration of “conversation," examining how news-related public discussions function within a deliberative democracy and how journalism’s challenge to be a conversation rather than a lecture in the digital age is bedeviled by design defects and the obstacles of participatory online culture. Special attention is paid to anonymous online comments and journalism’s contradictory relationship with anonymity. Through original interviews, anecdotes, field observations and summaries of research literature, the book argues for news organizations to show greater leadership in online public discourse and to use journalistic rigor and better design to add value to citizens’ comments above the polarized social layer. Too many news sites have shut down comments and pushed the responsibility of conversations to social media sites, whose motivations and ethical codes vary.

How did the American electorate become so hateful? Heap some blame on online comments.

The cry of college students demanding "safe spaces" to protect themselves from speech that could harm their sensitivities doesn’t confound me. I secretly wished for a safe space myself during my first year teaching at the University of Connecticut.

The first Connecticut businesses have gotten clearance from federal regulators to use small, unmanned aircraft for commercial purposes.

Candid online posts describing the challenges of breastfeeding fill the Facebook page of Breastfeeding USA’s Connecticut chapter. The daily stream of anecdotes, questions and comments alternate in tone from exasperated to celebratory.

In the age of status updates, Instagram filters and 140-character news alerts on Twitter, awareness in our current technological age orbits around our mobile devices. We check our screens more than 150 times a day, on average, motivated by the never-ending, Internet-powered stream of personalized information discovery.

Unlike other communities around the country, the suburban towns comprising the Fairfield County, CT “Gold Coast” aren’t suffering a void in local news coverage. It’s quite the opposite. More than 100 media outlets currently deliver local news and information to the area’s residents and businesses, almost all supported by local advertising.

Online publishers can learn from talk radio when it comes to audience engagement and user comments. Audience participation on the airwaves isn’t like the commenting free-for-all often found online. Human producers – not computer algorithms – screen callers before putting them on the air, ensuring that the contributions add value.

Now that AOL has laid off 40 percent of the Patch workforce, those of us concerned about the local news landscape in Connecticut want to know what’s going to happen to the state’s 67 Patch sites. Which sites will be shut down? Will AOL partner with existing Connecticut news organizations or independent news purveyors to keep sites going?

ESPN is the latest major news organization to rely upon social media to help civilize its online comments. Starting Wednesday, ESPN.com’s 25 million active users will have to log in through a Facebook account if they want to participate in online conversations on ESPN.com stories.

New Haven Black Panther trials, stalking Jodie Foster, the Unabomber, and more.

A personal essay about growing up as a multiracial American and being not quite minority enough.