Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Good things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem in journalism. At the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without oversight — as when, for example, a group of Redditors falsely accused someone of being the Boston Marathon bomber.

An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it or pay for it will probably go nowhere. At the same time, trust in the media is low and fact-checking efforts have become entwined with partisan politics.

So what would happen if you combined professional journalism with fact checking by the people? On Monday evening, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikitribune, an independent site (not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation) “that brings journalists and a community 
of volunteers together” in a combination that Wales hopes will combat fake news online — initially in English, then in other languages....

“Slightly disconcertingly, Lewis says he is “so thrilled” by the controversy. This is not because American voters were misled but because Facebook and Google have been embarrassed and forced to reconsider the complex algorithms they deploy to present news articles to their users.

It’s a matter of schadenfreude. Lewis has spent much of the three years since he became chief executive at Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal “badgering away” at Google and Facebook, trying to persuade them to change their news distribution methods.

“We kept warning them, saying ‘This is an accident waiting to happen – you are treating fake news in the same way as you are treating Wall Street Journal news. This is going to end up biting you.’ And so here it is, biting them!”...

We — John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis — want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News, and others — as well as publishers and users can do now and in the future to grapple with fake news and build better experiences online and more civil and informed discussion in society.

Key to our suggestions is sharing more information to help users make better-informed decisions in their conversations: signals of credibility and authority from Facebook to users, from media to Facebook, and from users to Facebook. Collaboration between the platforms and publishers is critical. In this post we focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. Two reasons: First simplicity. Second: today these platforms matter the most.

We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today. We start from the view that almost all of what we do online is valuable and enjoyable but there are always things we can do to improve the experience and act more responsibly.

In that spirit, we offer these tangible suggestions for action and seek your ideas.

Google has agreed to fund a project to develop automated fact checking tools amid anger over the prevalent of fake news websites during the US presidential election.

UK fact checking organisation, FullFact, has announced it has been awarded €50,000  (£43,000) by the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative to build the first  “fully automated end-to-end fact checking system”.

In a statement, FullFact explained that the system will have two main features. 

One will inform readers if something reported as fact has already been proven inaccurate.

The other mode will fact check claims automatically using Natural Language Processing and statistical analysis in real-time – something FullFact said has never been done before – by highlighting the text and having a factbox appear when the user hovers over it....

Paul Horner is a professional fake news writer, whose completely made-up story about the Amish committing their vote to Trump got over 134,000 likes on Facebook; his story about Obama signing an executive order to invalidate the election results has over 250,000 likes.

This week, The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey interviewed Horner--who is stunned that his work gets accepted as true.

“I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything -- they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist… I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works:

Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters -- they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything!”...

It was early evening in Politico’s newsroom, four days before the Iowa caucuses.

Reporters were working sources and checking TV screens as a presidential debate was about to get under way. But tonight, January 28, Politico’s biggest story was about itself.

Outside news organizations were reporting a massive, unexpected overhaul of the company’s leadership. Now executives were scrambling to respond. In a glass-enclosed office at the far end of the newsroom, CEO Jim VandeHei was hunkered down alongside chief operating officer Kim Kingsley and chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz, hurriedly crafting a statement announcing that they—along with marquee reporter Mike Allen—were leaving the company.

After months of behind-the-scenes drama, Washington’s most successful media partnership in a generation was busting apart. And all the players had to get their stories straight....

Fresco is a lot like Uber. But unlike similar apps where you request a car, takeout, or a even a dog walker, Fresco puts a call out for a photojournalist. A newsroom posts a request for video of, say, a crime scene, and a Fresco user in the area can accept, take a video of it, and upload it to Fresco. If the news outlet uses it, the Fresco user gets paid $50.

TV news stations across the country are using the app, but Fresco is particularly appealing to KTBY, a station in Anchorage, Alaska. Alaska is a big state, and many of KTBY’s viewers live in remote villages that are hours away by plane. It’s hard to cover those communities without spending a ton of money and time. In a Fresco promotional video, Scott Centers, COO of Coastal Television Broadcasting Company, which owns KTBY, marvels that Fresco offers an affordable alternative.

If there is one thing that Americans can agree on, it’s just how polarized they are.

Almost three-quarters of Americans – including both Democrats and Republicans – think the strained relationship between President Donald Trump and the news media is impeding their access to important political news, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

"Both politicians and the media have an interest in people getting political information. If Americans are concerned, that’s definitely something they want to be aware of.” -Michael Barthel

The lack of even a partisan split was reminiscent of a survey done late last year about the confusion that fake news was causing Americans, according to Michael Barthel, a Pew Research Associate who helped conduct both surveys.

“We found very few differences across groups in their concerns about fake news,” he said. “The evidence of polarization seem to be these things on which Americans can agree.”

Ninety-four percent of respondents said they have heard about the tensions between Trump and the media and 83 percent said the relationship is unhealthy....

Today the New York Times rolled out the big guns in the battle for truth. There, in Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column, were two digits the likes of which I have never seen in the Grey Lady.

Footnotes, people. Honest-to-God footnotes.

The footnotes were there to annotate a story about the Trump administration’s disregard for the truth: ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality.

By necessity, that story referenced two of the administration’s newly minuted “alternative facts”, a.k.a. lies. The first of these was the claim by Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, that more people had used DC’s Metro system the morning of Trump’s inauguration than had used it the morning of Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

The second was the President’s accusation that tensions between Trump and the intelligence community were caused by the meddling media....

If you want some light reading for eternity, Google the question “is the media biased.” The question is a staple of both the political right and the socialist left.

Either The Media is partisan against Republicans as part of our obvious liberal agenda, or the Corporate Media insidiously perpetuates the status quo by shutting out dissenting voices and uncomfortable narratives in favor of crony capitalism and entrenched privilege.

Choose your favorite. They’re both idiotic....