Earlier this month, the Omidyar Network and the Democracy Fund released a report examining six key issues presented by social media participation and manipulation, inspired, they say, because the current instability in democracies is causing potentially irrevocable harm to fundamental rights. Here is an excerpt.
Trying to make social media monitoring more manageable? First Draft News has some tactics and tools to help journalists sort through the mire on Twitter and Facebook as well as the more edgy 4chan and wildly popular Reddit.
Verifying video materials should be a routine part of reporting, but knowing how to use the digital tools to verify fake content is just one part of the skill. The creative techniques behind video verification are even more important.
What’s the #ddj community tweeting about? Our NodeXL mapping from May 29 to June 4 includes research on social media’s fake propaganda from @ddjournalism, mapping global refugee flow from @FastCompany and the tax bracket racket from @voxdotcom.
The Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016. It is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This attitude of readers choosing their own beliefs over facts has been a huge problem that beset journalism in the past year, with media outlets trying to regain readers’ trusts and debunking false news from dubious digital sites. Here is a list of initiatives to combat fake news that have popped up in response to this challenge.
It has only been 26 years since the world’s first website and server went live. Since then, digital journalism has evolved quickly through the portal era, the search era, and the social era. At present, digital journalism has entered a new phase — the Stories as a Service (SaaS) era — where journalism is paid for by readers, for readers, which will likely result in quality journalism, trustworthiness, and the building of new communities.
Highway Africa — Africa’s largest annual gathering of journalists — brought together a host of media practitioners from across Africa. Discussions at the two-day conference this year ranged from the challenges of media sustainability in the digital age to digital activism and internet regulation in Africa.
The relationship between transparency and political stability in democracies is simple: More transparency means more stable democratic rule. As transparency rises, democratically elected leaders are less likely to be ousted through extra-constitutional methods like a coup. In non-democracies the situation is more complicated. But greater transparency still means fewer coups.
At First Draft, we frequently receive emails from a whole range of people asking how they can start doing the sort of online open-source investigation and verification that they’ve seen us doing. The skills and methodologies used are all something that can be learnt through a little persistence, but here are a few pieces of advice to get you started.
A simple WordPress blog named #NoHaceFaltaPapel didn’t exist a year ago. Now it’s a publishing company whose El Español is responsible for the largest crowdfunding campaign for journalism to date. Previously at the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and now working in New York City for Univision Noticias, María Ramírez and her husband Eduardo Suárez launched the blog last April to explore media innovation at the International Symposium of Online Journalists.
