Planning for news, misidentification and verification as a process

First Draft
First Draft Footnotes
2 min readApr 29, 2016

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Hi everyone,

So this week we held the second in our series of free training workshops from global newsrooms, this time livestreamed from the headquarters of The New York Times.

You can watch the full, unedited video of #FDLive on our YouTube channel, but the talks with Storyful’s Joe Galvin, EMHub’s Claire Wardle and BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman should be available individually from next week.

In the mean time, we’ve got a couple of write-ups from the workshops and a feature on the troubling practice of newsrooms wrongly identifying suspects in breaking news because of social media claims:

What else was there?

Well. New research from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism found that coding came top of a list of 22 skills deemed “hiring priorities” at news organisations, while fact-checking and verification came 21st. Second to bottom. This coincided neatly with a number of thinkpieces lamenting the state of the news media and the chasing of the “next new thing” over quality journalism. Mark Stencel, author of the original research, spoke to Poynter about his conclusion that it might not all be doom and gloom. Here’s hoping.

Meanwhile, Sue Llewellyn gave a run down of the dangers of live-streaming at MoJoCon and the Daily Mail got in a spot of bother after publishing a story based on the wedding of a “Twitter famous” couple that trended, apparently pilfering the pictures from social media and making up the details in between. All that glitters etc.

I’ll be back next week with some of the videos from #FDLive, another feature from one of our coalition partners and the fake news quiz for the month of April.

Until then, all the best and stay true,

Alastair

Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
@ajreid

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First Draft
First Draft Footnotes

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