Fake news, free tools and open training for all
Hi everyone,
Quite an exciting announcement from us here at First Draft this week, as we’re proud to launch the first in a series of free online workshops on social newsgathering and verification in collaboration with major global newsrooms.
On Monday 14th March we’ll be livestreaming the first training workshop from the Guardian offices in London at firstdraft.news/FDLive.
Members of the First Draft coalition from Storyful, Reported.ly and Bellingcat will discuss their work in reporting terror attacks, investigating weapons shipments, and geolocating the Syrian conflict.
Livestreams of the sessions will be available at FirstDraftNews.com from 1:45pm GMT (8:45am ET), and you can submit questions to the panel on #FDLive in the week leading up to the event. Find out more in our announcement post.
Here’s what we published this week:
- The eternal bulldozer of time pushes ever forward, and as March begins we look back at the viral news stories of February. But do you know which are true and which are false?
- Most newsrooms these days have one eye on the bottom line, so Storyful put together a list of free or cheap tools for those working on a budget.
- A fake New York Times article about Bernie Sanders clocked up more than 50,000 views before Super Tuesday, numbers the Old Gray Lady herself would be proud of. Doesn’t stop it being a pack of lies though. Luckily, the ever-vigilant Josh Stearns has us covered, with his tips on how to spot fake news websites.
What else was there?
Poynter looked at HoaxMap, a new project debunking rumours about refugees in Germany; the folks at AutomatingOSINT have more brains than they know what to do with so built a way to find weapons in social media images automatically (yes, really); and it seems BuzzFeed are taking on UK churnalism one dodgy press release at a time.
So far they have missed the comedian getting himself on the BBC as a completely fictional witness to a forced aircraft landing in Berlin. The Daily Mirror did not, however, gleefully writing up the mistake but failing to mention that they fell for the hoax as well, copying the BBC interview verbatim before deleting their take without a word. The original article was stored on WebArchive though, so it goes to show that everyone makes mistakes, but it is getting ever harder to hide them.
Until next week, all the best and stay true,
Alastair
Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
@ajreid
