Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Last Sunday morning on Reliable Sources, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked his considerable audience to be on guard for one of this election cycle’s most ugly features: fake news sites. He accurately them called “a plague” across the internet. He proposed a new rule for social-media users: “Triple check before you share,” and he offered some useful tips on how to do that.

I’m not a fan of CNN’s generally atrocious political coverage in the past 18 months, to put it mildly. But I am a big fan of Stelter’s work; he’s currently the beacon of light at the news channel. His don’t-fall-for-fake-news advice, part of a series of commentaries he’s been delivering, is a key reason why.

In pieces like the one that ran on Sunday, Stelter has done what the traditional media have largely failed to do: Leading the way in bringing media-literacy skills to the wider public. Given the size of his audience, on TV and online, it is probably no exaggeration to call him, as I did the other day, “America’s most influential teacher of media literacy in the digital age.”...

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.