Fake news, power-searching Twitter and an ethics code for UGC
Hi everyone,
Apologies for the missed week last week, but I was on some much-needed annual leave. I hope you’ve got some planned soon too.
Just a couple of updates this week though, before most of us at First Draft are off to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival. You can check out all the sessions we’re running on our events page here, and the full programme and speakers list here.
Come say hi if you’re going.
Here’s what we’ve published since last time:
- A guest post from Fabrice Deprez went into detail on using Twitter’s search operators to get closer to the story in breaking news. Definitely worth bookmarking.
- March was a horrible month for news, but that didn’t stop the fakers rearing their ugly heads. Take our fake news quiz and see if you spotted what was true and what was false. Warning: It gets a bit NSFW.
What else was there?
The Online News Association launched an ethics code for social newsgathering and UGC supported by global news organisations, an important project that seems to be even more urgent with every major news event. The Guardian’s social and new formats editor, Martin Belam, wrote on this exact subject in the wake of the bombings in Brussels, followed by a Medium post discussing how difficult it is to get Western readers to read about attacks like Lahore.
After the seemingly endless doom and gloom of the news cycle, there was one story which brought a tear of joy to my jaded, jetlagged eye: A nine-year-old crime reporter from Philadelphia is beating her competition to exclusives as the editor and publisher of her own Orange Street News. The third-grader has run the newspaper since she was seven, has an audience of subscribers and received almost 18,000 hits in March. There is hope for us all yet.
I’ll be back next week with the best from Perugia and #IJF16.
Until then, all the best and stay true,
Alastair
Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
@ajreid
