Standing in stark contrast to so many online platforms, why to Wikipedia contributors tend to treat each other with tolerance and dignity? The Washington Post wonders. “Many places on the Internet exist to inflame partisan tendencies; but it appears that working on Wikipedia might actually de-radicalize people,” it writes. “On Wikipedia, the community expects people to engage with opposing viewpoints -- to resolve their disputes through reasoned debate, not through shouting.”

The third quarter of the year has not brought relief for the newspaper industry, but it has brought plenty of layoffs and buyouts (and doom and gloom).

Large numbers of U.S. Web users were unable to access their favorite sites early on Friday morning. “Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning,” Gizmodo reports. “This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host.” As such, “It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.”

First, religion grabbed our attention, then media. Google’s goal is “no longer to read the Web, it’s to read us.” Our attention is being sold by a company like Facebook. On the Internet, we've become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.

NBCUniversal is reportedly planning to invest another $200 million into Buzzfeed, in a deal that will value the digital publisher at about $1.7 billion. “Those are roughly the same numbers NBCUniversal used last year, when it first invested in BuzzFeed -- except that deal gave BuzzFeed a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion,” Recode reports. Yet, “since those deals, some … investors have become more wary about betting on digital media companies.”  

Google News is rolling out a new fact-check feature in search results for news stories. “Launched today, fact check will now appear as a label among news search results, alongside other established labels, such as opinion, local source and highly cited,” The Guardian reports. “Google News algorithmically connects fact-checking articles with live news stories partly based on an established process.”  

Gannett is reportedly nearing a deal to buy Tronc -- the print powerhouse formerly known as Tribune Publishing. “The announcement of a deal could come as soon as business opens on the fourth quarter of the year, as early as Monday morning,” Politico reports, citing sources. “Tronc’s board of directors held a meeting Thursday, sources said, that was likely focused on the sale.”