News Impact Summit: Verification, investigation, and digital ethics

Fact-checking and verification have become buzzwords for today’s journalism. Particularly in the digital age, there are various challenges that media outlets and journalists encounter when sourcing on social networks and verifying user-generated content. The questions: are we doing the job right? Are we accurately crediting the sources and labeling the crowdsourced contents? And even worse, are we the ones who are spreading unconfirmed rumours and unverified social media contents through our media products?
This panel session will highlight some of the findings from the recent Tow Center’s studies namely, ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation‘ which was published in February 2015 and ‘Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content‘ which was released in May 2014.

This session is supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

This session invites 6 speakers to give a 5-min inspirational talk on their UGC verification strategies, as well as their products and services that support journalists’ day-to-day work.

Verification has become a norm in today’s newsroom; we are all aware of the importance of validating claims and contents for more accurate reporting. Yet, being on the front line when news breaks often results anxiety and confusion, especially when there are no strategies, expertise, networks and workflow that support the verification process. What can we learn from the practiced strategies in today’s journalism, particularly from a world-leading verification expert like Eliot Higgins, and high-profile delegates from the German media outlets? This session will discuss the best practices with the experts on the front line, and how we can best design and implement verification strategies and workflow.

Overview of research tools: Survey of Google’s tools to help your news gathering. Discover new trends in search, find and visualize useful datasets, uncover specialized tools for finding and verifying photos, and get a better understanding for how Google Search works.

This session provides guidance on the fundamentals of verification. This includes a look at the approaches and tools to use when verifying digital images, video and text content, as well as an overview of the common types of online fakes.

An advanced look at verification and analysis technique, using Google Earth and other tools.

Verification is certainly at the heart of digital skills for journalism, and it is deeply connected to another key task: curation. Before we verify information, we need to aggregate and filter data in order to makes sure that we find it. Tame was developed to make sure journalists don’t miss anything related to their beat, but don’t get swept away by the flood of data at the same time.This session will put participants in the position to set up their own curation engine with the help of Twitter, Tame and a selection of complimentary tools.

This workshop and demo session will include both hands-on activities as well as showcasing research work in the areas of news discovery and verification. The focus will be on outcomes and current status of the work carried out in two EC co-funded, multinational research & development projects, namely SocialSensor and Reveal.

News discovery through event detection in Social Media will be presented by demonstrating state-of-the-art work in real-time trend detection originating on Twitter, with results being further enriched by relevant multimedia content found in multiple social networks. In the verification part of the session we will showcase automated verification efforts of news items posted on Twitter. Also, results of an almost market-ready service (the TruthNest) will be demonstrated.
Participants will be given the opportunity to test and trial the demoed prototypes and solutions (so bring your connected devices). There will be sufficient time for questions & answers plus discussions.

This session explores the ethical considerations for newsrooms when sourcing user-generated content. It will address how the establishment of workflows and high verification standards can enable news organisations to process huge amounts of social and user-generated content efficiently and accurately.

Fergus will also demonstrate how SAM has tackled these issues in order to get efficient workflows embedded into newsrooms to ultimately tell better stories.

A map can bring your story, and data, to life. This session will survey Google’s mapping tools and technology, and how you can use them to tell visually compelling stories across the web, print and video. We’ll demo and highlight examples of how newsrooms around the world are using these tools, and address your permissions and licensing questions.

For in-depth verification processes, data driven investigations represent a major challenge. Their primary source material can be biased in various ways and is often transformed multiple times before their results appear in journalistic stories. Christina Elmer and Maximilian Schäfer will present different examples of data journalistic workflows demonstrating challenges and solution approaches – both within daily journalism and long-term investigations.

In an era in which media credibility is declining as precipitously as the number of media outlets is increasing, journalists must reinvent both the forms and ideas of media ethics to distinguish themselves from those who would claim their mantle as professional and trustworthy communicators. The ONA is building the “Do-It-Yourself” Code of Ethics in order to provide news professionals and media organizations with the method and means to develop, articulate, understand, create, and ultimately publicize the high ethical standards to which they aspire.