If we know lots of people on social will only glance at our headlines and not tap through, why can’t we bring better information to them where they are? By Joshua Benton, for NiemanLab This is a great idea: In order to reduce the number of its old stories that get recirculated as new, The Guardian is making a story’s age more prominent, both to readers and to those who…
By Bellingcat Investigation Team On 11 October 2014, a Facebook profile to a person named “Ruslan Boshirov” — the cover identity of Skripal poisoner Anatoliy Chepiga — posted a lone photograph of Prague, showing the heavily trafficked Old Town Square and the Astronomical Clock. The upload date of this photograph coincides with a report from the Czech publication iRozhlas that “Boshirov” (Chepiga) visited Prague on 11 October 2014. The Daily Mail reported — which, obviously, requires more than…
This new publication by UNESCO is a timely resource and highly topical subject for all those who practice or teach journalism in this Digital Age. By UNESCO Developments in the last few years have placed journalism under fire. A range of factors are transforming the communications landscape, raising questions about the quality, impact and credibility of journalism. At the same time, orchestrated campaigns are spreading untruths – disinformation, mal-information and…
Source: MotherJones.com / own There are no better experts in fighting against fake news and disinformation than Americans. No wonder. They are wise after the event – for the long time they have been victims of Russian troll army attacks, their bots and fake news meant to spread unrest and arouse social divisions. Therefore, we are not going to reinvent the wheel but, basing on the text from Mother Jones…
By Aric Toler, BellingcatOne of the most common issues for researchers and journalists is verifying user-generated video content, most often found on social networks and file sharing platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. There is no silver bullet to verify every video, and it may be nearly impossible to verify some videos short of acquiring the original file from the source. However, there is a range of…
By Nathan Yau, FlowingData By Nathan Yau, FlowingData It used to be that we’d see a poorly made graph or a data design goof, laugh it up a bit, and then carry on. At some point though — during this past year especially — it grew more difficult to distinguish a visualization snafu from bias and deliberate misinformation. Of course, lying with statistics has been a thing for a long…
Over the last decade newsrooms have spent a lot of time building their digital toolbox. But today we need a new toolbox for building trust By Josh Stearns, Verification Junkie, for FirstDraftNews Earlier this year Gallup reported that trust in media, already at dismal levels, reached an all-time low. This erosion in trust has real implications for journalism’s role in democracy, its sustainability and its ability to be an anchor…
Amnesty International launches a new site to help journalists verify YouTube videos You can hear gunshots in the background of this shaky amateur YouTube video. There’s black smoke rising out of what looks to be a mosque; the narrator speaks in Arabic; the video’s description says the video was shot in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria. The video is compelling, but is it real? If it’s real, does this video…
Do you find newsworthy videos are often deleted before you get a chance to verify them and use them in your reporting? Video Vault might be your new best friend, Alastair Reid wrote for First Draft What is Video Vault? A tool to help archive videos online, with extra facilities for verification and collaboration. Do I have to pay for it? No, once your email address has been approved to use…
This article is part of a larger guidebook by RuNet Echo to help people learn how to conduct open-source research on the Russian Internet. Explore the complete guidebook at the special project page. RuNet Echo has now published eight installments in a guidebook on conducting open-source research on the Russian Internet. This ninth and final entry takes the tools and instructions we’ve been studying and applies them to a single case study: the…
