Sara Fischer

New studies suggest that efforts to bring transparency to media — including attempts by journalists to publicly defend their work, media literacy campaigns, more transparent funding and improved fact-checking partnerships — have helped the media recover a bit of trust with the public after hitting an all-time low in 2016. While trust in the news media has recovered slightly since 2016, it still remains low compared to decades of prior research conducted by Gallup.

The big and powerful are getting bigger and more powerful — and the clear and dominant winners are big cities. With wealth, jobs, and power increasingly concentrated in a few large cities, we are witnessing a growing economic and political divide between urban and rural America. As we've previously written, it's part of a larger dynamic favoring "superstar" countries and companies, too — behemoths that appear positioned to dominate the future global economy. This fuels us-versus-them. New cool technologies hit cities first, be it 5G, autonomous transportation or drone delivery.

Nearly 8 out of 10 smartphone users in the US use their phones to access the internet at home more than or as much as a computer, according to an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. It's a sign of how much people's online habits have evolved, as smartphones and smart TVs are becoming the primary gateway to internet at home compared to desktops and tablets. More than twice as many people said they use smartphones more often than computers to connect with the internet, compared to those who use computers more often. Other findings:

High-speed broadband and mobile internet have created more opportunities to access free news and information than ever before. But they have also made it harder for quality news and information outlets, particularly ones in rural areas, to survive. Tech has disrupted the local media business model and pushed more journalism behind paywalls — and there's no end in sight. Experts worry that the deployment of 5G over the next few years will worsen the digital divide and have a lasting impact on how rural communities will be able to access quality news and information.

A new report from Cisco forecasts an alarmingly slow internet traffic growth rate for Latin America, especially when compared to the other lagging regions, like the Middle East and Africa. When it comes to internet speed, Latin America is far behind all other regions and will continue to lag over the next five years, per the report.

Bots spreading misinformation are using more sophisticated techniques, like going after specific human influencers and targeting misleading information within the first few seconds of it being posted, according to new studies.

President Donald Trump continues to comment on antitrust matters related to media companies he doesn't like, and experts worry the resulting political fray could hinder the Justice Department's ability to independently evaluate mergers. Media companies looking to merge amid an already difficult economic climate now have to consider this reality as a part of their business decisions. 

The internet is an invisible mesh that enables instantaneous global communications, but delivering all those bits quickly to more people in more places requires increasingly exotic approaches. Here are a few things you may not realize about how communication pipes work around the world:

President Donald Trump said his administration is looking seriously at antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook and Amazon. In the next breath, he argued they are great companies that he wants to help. "I leave it to others, but I do have a lot of people talking about monopoly when they mention those three in particular." "We are looking at [antitrust] very seriously ... Look, that doesn't mean we're doing it, but we're certainly looking and I think most people surmise that, I would imagine," he said.

Telecommunication companies AT&T and Verizon are both pursuing a strategy that marries content and distribution. But they are taking two different approaches and, so far, seeing radically different results. Verizon admitted that its media arm, Oath — which consists of AOL, HuffPost, Yahoo and other digital brands — is struggling to drive revenue.