News about fact checking projects

Weekly news about fact checking

https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/fact-checking-project/week-fact-checking-truth-fact-checkers-disagreements/?utm_source=API+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=e58c471779-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-e58c471779-31701933

Jay Rosen argues for evidence based journalism, against accusation led reporting: 
"If you are evidence-based you lead with the lack of evidence for explosive or insidious charges. That becomes the news. If you are accusation-driven, the news is that certain people are making charges. With the details we may learn that there's no evidence, but the frame in which that discovery is made remains "he said, she said." (See my 2009 post about that.) "
https://storify.com/jayrosen_nyu/evidence-based-vs-accusation-driven-reporting?utm_source=API+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=c681c44bba-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-c681c44bba-31701933

Political journalism changed in 2016

CNN reporting: The traditional model of "he said, she said" journalism, in which news reports simply put both sides of a story against one another, was thrown out the window in favor of a more aggressive journalism that sought to prioritize accuracy over balance.To many journalists, political scientists and media experts, this was a welcome change: It unburdened the American press from false equivalency and made them more responsible stewards of information. To critics, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, the whole endeavor laid bare the innate biases of a coastal, liberal news media.

'Not the dinosaurs of print': Funding journalism in the digital age

journalism.co reporting:

Jane Singer, professor of journalism innovation at City University, noted that as well as the free titles, the 'elite' press, such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, will survive as long as its approach changes towards favouring more longform content such as analysis and interpretation."There is an elite audience that will continue to want a print product, but it is becoming much more like a magazine – the format is changing," said Singer.The Times has just significantly updated the way in which it delivers online journalism on its website and smartphone apps.These new products favour in-depth analysis rather than "the flim-flam of passing news" which can be found online elsewhere."What we don't want to do is knock out the kind of quality journalism that we produce in favour of quick wire stories which, frankly, you could find updated somewhere else," said Sarah Baxter, deputy editor of The Sunday Times, speaking on the panel.The digital platforms still include global breaking news, but focus on providing more longform content, updating in editions around 9am, 12pm and 6pm when there is a spike in readers.https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/-not-the-dinosaurs-of-print-funding-journalism-in-the-digital-age/s2/a624426/

How Fortune draws from 5,000 outside contributors

digiday reporting:
Lest it repeat the mistakes of others, Fortune solicits and edits the opinion pieces itself, using a team of five. The expert advice comes from invitation-only communities of people whom Fortune has put on an editorial list like Most Powerful Women or have attended one of its conferences. Of the 120 posts a day that get published on Fortune.com, only about seven are contributed. At Harvard Business Review, by contrast, the vast majority of the site’s content comes from outside contributors.
Fortune’s approach naturally limits its ability to grow its audience. Fortune had 11 million unique visitors in February, up 33 percent over a year ago. But it still lags other business news sites, including Forbes at 40 million, Business Insider at 46 million and Yahoo Finance at 78 million.
http://digiday.com/publishers/fortune-hopes-avoid-platform-publishing-pitfalls/

THE FUTURE OF NEWS IS NOT AN ARTICLE

NYT reporting:
Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update.
...he biggest underlying shift in conceiving of the future of news as something more than than a stream of articles is in the implied distinction between ephemeral content and evergreen content. There has always been a mixture of the two types in news reporting: An article will contain a narrative about the event that is currently occurring but also will contain more evergreen information such as background context, key players, etc. But the reliance on the form of the article as the atomic unit of news means that all of that information has essentially been treated as ephemeral. A news organization publishes hundreds of articles a day, then starts all over the next day, recreating any redundant content each time. This approach is deeply shaped by the constraints of print media and seems unnecessary and strange when looked at from a natively digital perspective. Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture, you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping information? The idea seems absurd in that context and yet, it is essentially what news publishers do every day. The Particles approach suggests that we need to identify the evergreen, reusable pieces of information at the time of creation, so that they can be reused in new contexts. It means that news organizations are not just creating the “first draft of history”, but are synthesizing the second draft at the same time, becoming a resource for knowledge and civic understanding in new and powerful ways.
http://nytlabs.com/blog/2015/10/20/particles/

A MANIFESTO FOR STRUCTURED JOURNALISM

BBC reporting:

We’re going to do two things - firstly, to explore how to make it easier for journalists, in their day to day work, to capture structured data about the key movers and shakers in the news; and secondly, build things on top of structured data that allow audiences to explore the news, understand it better, and make as much use of the data as a journalist can. The fact is, we don’t know what the future of journalism is. But if we put concerted effort into this, and be open about it, perhaps we as an industry can find what works.The existing model of storylines, a result of years of research and partnerships, gives us a head start here. Making narratives out of structured data, and allowing room for different points of view, and links to publicly available evidence, is a key aspect of what we want to achieve. And all of this results in an archive of news which is a living resource of open knowledge for journalists and society at large.

http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/2015/07/07/a-manifesto-for-structured-journalism/

Publishing for peanuts. Innovations in journalism report

"We were inspired and encouraged by what we saw. All over the world, independent media outlets are innovating and overcoming obstacles. Globally, start-ups are demonstrating the drive to take risks for the sake of a good idea. The challenges facing these outlets—and the innovations employed to tackle them—broadly fall into four categories: editorial, business, distribution and security. Operating with agility, media start-ups are finding creative ways to gather and disseminate information. In India, Gram Vaani uses a mobile phone social network to connect the rural poor and circumvent legislative prohibitions on radio broadcasting. In Zimbabwe, The Source survives in the repressive media climate by focusing on business journalism..."
http://gijn.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2015/10/PublishingforPeanuts_Public.pdf?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Publishing%202015-11-17&utm_term=Digiday%20Publishing%20Newsletter

Newsonomics: 10 Numbers on The New York Times’ 1 million Digital-Subscriber Milestone

Newsonomics reporting:

...4. The Times can count about the same number of payingdaily readers today as it could in 1995.

In those pre-digital days, the Times’ daily circulation stood at 1.5 million. Today, it counts 625,000 daily print payers (home delivery and single copy) and those 1 million digital payers. That’s a little over 1.6 million. That’s another mind-boggling equivalency. With all that has changed, in the news business particularly, roughly the same number of people pay for The New York Times. One takeaway: Even at the peak of financial success — and the ’90s were good for the industry — the Times still relied on only a tiny percentage of Americans. At one point, a million and a half paying readers meant sustaining prosperity. Now, it seems like a shaky lifeline. There’s truth and there’s perception, and a lot to think about..

9. Newsroom investment is a business driver.

Of the Times’ total expense budget, about 20 percent goes to the newsroom. That’s about one-third more than the average U.S. daily, which spends 12.5 percent — or one out of eight dollars — on content creation. It’s no accident that the two regional leaders in digital-only sales, The Boston Globe (with 63,000 digital-only subscribers) and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis (with 58,000 digital-onlies), both spend closer to 20 percent as well. Readers know quality, depth, and breadth when they see it, and they’re willing to pay for it. There’s a lesson in that for the industry.

The Guardian: A 200-year old startup?

EJO reporting:

The Guardian’s London newsroom was reorganised in January, into four identifiable operational sectors covering the entire range of the newspaper’s activities: the “news desk” manages business, national and international news; “live desk” covers breaking news and live events; “visuals” deals with data projects, infographics and anything with a visual angle, while “audience” works to engage the readers and to manage social activities and interaction with the public – including data analysis. Paper and digital work closely together.

“It’s like launching a 200-year old startup”

“We wanted a vertical structure which could also enable multidisciplinary approaches,” Pilhofer told an audience at this month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. In a talk, entitled, ‘It’s like launching a 200-year old start-up’ Philhofer said: “The idea of this reorganisation is to deliver every possible journalistic ambition we have.” He described multimedia and interactive projects, such as “Guantanamo Diary” or the motion graphic explanatory guide to Scotland’s independence referendum as examples.

...“To put content on the homepage and pray for the best doesn’t work anymore,” Pilhofer said. Instead the newspaper studies the metrics of how readers move through content, to understand their behavior. Such data has helped the newspaper build a picture about what readers want to read, and what they ignore.

The newspaper uses Ophan, a software which enables journalists to receive information about traffic data for each story published on its site. Pilhofer said that these figures have not meant an endless diet of kitten stories at the paper, instead such data can spark “interesting conversations in your newsroom.”

“The future of journalism is a team sport”

http://en.ejo.ch/digital-news/the-guardian-a-200-year-old-startup?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=93b3d16533-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-93b3d16533-384988165

What are the boundaries of today’s journalism, and how is the rise of digital changing who defines them?

NiemanLab reporting:
In a new book, a group of academics look at how the big defining questions of the field — what is journalism? who is a journalist? who decides? — are changing.
...In other words, the study of boundaries provides a cartography of society. From this viewpoint, questions quickly spring forth: Where are boundaries around journalism drawn? Who makes these distinctions? How do boundaries get made? What are their consequences?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/what-are-the-boundaries-of-todays-journalism-and-how-is-the-rise-of-digital-changing-who-defines-them/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=2bfe5cb592-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-2bfe5cb592-384988165

2015 Pulitzer Winners

Journalism

PUBLIC SERVICE - The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC

BREAKING NEWS REPORTING - The Seattle Times Staff

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING - Two Prizes: - Eric Lipton of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Staff

EXPLANATORY REPORTING - Zachary R. Mider of Bloomberg News

LOCAL REPORTING - Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci of theDaily Breeze, Torrance, CA

NATIONAL REPORTING - Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING - The New York Times Staff

FEATURE WRITING - Diana Marcum of the Los Angeles Times

COMMENTARY - Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle

CRITICISM - Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times

EDITORIAL WRITING - Kathleen Kingsbury of The Boston Globe

EDITORIAL CARTOONING - Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Photography Staff

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY - Daniel Berehulak , freelance photographer, The New York Times

Books, Drama and Music...

http://www.pulitzer.org/node/8501

REINVENTING THE WIRE HOW TO PREPARE FOR CONSTANT DISRUPTIONS

Reuters Institute reporting:

Jairo reviews the large amount of literature already published in this area, and supplements it with interviews with senior figures at Thomson Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse. 

He focuses his paper on three key questions:

• Is the corporate culture in news agencies evolving fast enough to keep pace with new industry routines that will enable them to cope with the demands of an internet world in constant change?
• Is there a common strategy in news agencies to help improve the skill sets of current employees to increase the value of stories and become better news curators in the mobile internet era?
• What innovative tools are available that will eventually be disruptive for the future of news agencies? ...
• Amongst Jairo’s many conclusions is his view that ‘News agencies will now have to operate somehow like an open-data, open-journalism system, and earn revenues from it.  Publishers are asking for more elaborate news pieces, videos, and visual content, something that news agencies, precisely because of the handling of vast amounts of sources of information they’re involved in, are better positioned to provide.

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/reinventing-wire

Here’s a recipe for successfully crowdfunding journalism in 2015

NiemanLab reporting:
American Public Media has decided that Spot.us doesn’t work any more in today’s crowdfunding environment. But they also investigated what does — and laid out a model for others to use.
...As Cohn so often said, Spot.us “was an experiment in pushing the boundaries of transparency and participation in the process of journalism.” And it is in that spirit that we would like to share with you some of CVE’s other findings, specifically those that will help to write a new chapter in the crowdfunding playbook.

...Kickstarter boasts 7.9 million users, including 2.3 million who have backed more than one project. Indiegogo, meanwhile, touts 15 million monthly visitors. (Donor stats were not immediately available.)

These large-scale platforms introduce users to projects via genre recommendations, making it possible for you to reach new audiences with an affinity for the kind of content you are making, even if they’ve never heard of you before.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/heres-a-recipe-for-successfully-crowdfunding-journalism-in-2015/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=33bfda97a2-Need_to_Know_February_12_20152_12_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-33bfda97a2-31701933

Emily Bell: Social networks and journalists need to work together

gigaom reporting:

Rise of the tabloid web

...As Bell points out, most newsrooms — even the slow-moving, traditionally-focused ones like the New York Times — have come to realize that they need to understand and take advantage of the social sharing that platforms like Facebook provide, because that is how content works now. Everyone wants to “go viral.” In a sense, the web is encouraging everyone to think like the editor of a tabloid newspaper like the Daily Mirror. What do readers want and how can we give it to them as quickly as possible?

The problem — as Bell outlined in a similar lecture last year at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — is that journalists and media companiesno longer have any control whatsoever over what happens to their content once they publish it. Proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter and Google are now the power brokers who determine who sees your story and when, and their decisions are made for reasons that may have nothing to do with the journalistic quality of your content....

The bottom line, Bell says, is that journalists and technology companies or social platforms need to work together to figure out how to handle the atomized, networked and democratized media environment we all find ourselves in. It’s not enough for Facebook or Google to say they aren’t journalistic organizations and therefore they don’t have a duty to consider things like free speech — they are functioning as journalistic tools, and they have a larger responsibility to society.

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/emily-bell-social-networks-and-journalists-need-to-work-together/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=5a0a2bfcf0-c:mdad:02-02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-5a0a2bfcf0-99152541

The case for, and against, integrated print-digital newsrooms

digiday reporting:

...Now that time has passed, some publishers are recognizing that each platform has a distinct nature that demands its own specialists. We talked to two publishers, one with an integrated newsroom and one with separate print/Web staffs, to give both sides of the issue.

Daily News The tabloid paper integrated its print and Web staffs in 2011 when it also adopted a new content-management system, believing a platform-agnostic approach would help increase its posting volume. Today, the 270-person edit staff generates 200-300 online posts a day, up from 50 two years earlier, and traffic has grown to 26 million monthly uniques, a nearly 50 percent increase, according to comScore...

Daily Mail The online arm of the Daily Mail of the U.K. has become a digital powerhouse, with a U.S. audience (47 million uniques) that trumps many homegrown news sites, and, it’s worth noting, doubling its homepage traffic in the past two years. It credits that growth with a site that’s always been managed separately from the print paper, a practice that continued when Martin Clarke became editor-in-chief in 2006...http://digiday.com/publishers/print-digital-newsrooms/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=61770be421-Need_to_Know_January_23_20151_23_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-61770be421-31701933

The worst journalism of 2014

CJR reporting:

This year has been one of many triumphs for journalists, who’ve told the stories of political struggle at home and violent struggle abroad, a public health crisis and airline tragedies that drew the eyes of the world, and self-examinations of American racial, domestic, and sexual norms. There have also been plenty of screw-ups, and CJR has kept track of them so you don’t have to. The additional DARTS awarded below aren’t necessarily the most impactful bloopers of the year, though several of them are among the most cringeworthy. Here’s one last salute to the year’s worst of the worst before their final burial at digital sea.
A complete unknown, like Rolling Stone
The disintegration of the magazine’s visceral campus rape story from Nov. 19 wins this year’s media-fail sweepstakes. University of Virginia student “Jackie”’s gang rape tale was heralded as the type of story only Rolling Stone was capable of telling, one that could change the national conversation around contemporary sexual culture. But within two weeks, it began to fall apart.
Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn’t contact the alleged perpetrators of Jackie’s rape, not to mention three of her friends portrayed as unsympathetic to it. It turns out, as reported in a sterling clean-up job by The Washington Post, that Jackie’s account in the story doesn’t match her friends’ recollections of the incident. ...

Digital Publishing: To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Editor&Publisher reporting:
...

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter.

According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the
company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new
media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the
importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18
times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a
tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.”
Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets.
While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes.
So should it really be a requirement, in today’s digital environment, for reporters and editors to be on Twitter? Yes, according to Steve Buttry, formerly the digital transformation editor for Digital First Media, now Lamar Visiting Scholar at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, Buttry called out Baquet in a blog post, making the case that journalists that choose not to be active on Twitter “choose to remain or fall behind.”

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter. According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18 times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.” Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets. While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes. - See more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-#sthash.K5MqyV7e.dpuf

But to all the editors and reporters reading this column, I’m only going to say this once—it’s not cool, and actually detrimental to your job, to ignore Twitter. According to a now-famous innovation report from the New York Times, the company has struggled getting all of its journalists to board this “new media” train and embrace digital change. It specifically mentioned the importance of Twitter to the digital future of the Times no less than 18 times. Buzzfeed had a little fun with the Times’ staff, taking readers on a tour of some of the abandoned accounts its staffers launched that have since been abandoned, a “graveyard of egg profiles.” Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the newsroom’s leader, executive editor Dean Baquet, who joined Twitter back in September 2011, has more than 11,000 followers, yet has only composed a grand total of two tweets. While most professional journalists see the obvious benefits of Twitter, high-profile holdouts like Baquet have their defenders. After all, Twitter can be an obvious distraction to reporters on deadline, and with so many social networks out there (have you gotten an invite yet from Ello?), is 8-year-old Twitter even that sexy anymore? As Matt McFarland over at the Washington Post noted, Buzzfeed actually gets more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter, and no one is complaining about Baquet’s lack of pinned recipes. - See more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-#sthash.K5MqyV7e.dpuf

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Columns/Digital-Publishing--To-Tweet-or-Not-to-Tweet-

Ken Doctor: “Rosewater,” cascading censorship, and press freedom

Ken Doctor reporting:
As the year ends, take a moment to look past business models and apps and think about how you can help the challenged cause of press freedom worldwide....
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/ken-doctor-rosewater-cascading-censorship-and-press-freedom/

6 online tools for investigative journalism

journalism.co.uk reporting:

6 online tools for investigative journalism
'Civic technologist' Friedrich Lindenberg shares a range of tools journalists can use in investigative journalism projects

Investigative journalism has long been the marker by which news organisations – and journalists – measure their worth.

"As a journalist your main tool is talking to people and asking the right questions of the right people," said civic technologist and self-described "OpenGov and data journalism geek" Friedrich Lindenberg in a webinar on investigative journalism tools for the International Centre for Journalists last week.

"This is still true, but also you can ask the right questions with the right databases. You can ask the right questions with the right tools."

Lindenberg listed an arsenal of tools the investigative journalist can equip themselves with. Here are some of the highlights.

DocumentCloud

Lindenberg described DocumentCloud as a "shared folder of documents", offering different folders that can be used for various investigations, control over who can access which documents, the ability to annotate different parts of documents, search throughout and embed segments or entire documents.

Even better, DocumentCloud looks for "entities" – such as people, companies, countries, institutions – identifies them and makes them searchable, which is especially useful for legal documents that may stretch into hundreds of pages when you are only interested in a few key points...
Overview

A "bit more of an expert tool", according to Lindenberg, Overview lets the user import documents from DocumentCloud or CSV files and then counts the frequency of words to make a "hierarchy of terms" for words.

When used this way, Overview can give a quick rundown of large numbers of documents, making it easier to understand the core topics.

OpenCorporates...
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/6-online-tools-for-investigative-journalism/s2/a563510/?utm_source=API%27s%20Need%20to%20Know%20newsletter&utm_campaign=d520b51cfb-Need_to_Know_December_17_201412_17_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-d520b51cfb-31701933