Tweetdeck updates, lessons from reported.ly and big news from us
Hi everyone,
After a year as a coalition of nine organisations, last week we announced the First Draft Partner Network, uniting news organisations, social networks and technology firms in the pursuit of answers to the challenges we regularly discuss here at First Draft.
As our managing director, Jenni Sargent, said in the announcement: “We are not going to solve these problems over night, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organisations.”
You can read all about the partner network here, and we’ll be sharing details about more partners and plans for the network in the near future.
Here’s what else we’ve been up to since last time:
- First Look Media stopped funding reported.ly at the end of August, leaving some of the brightest minds in journalism without jobs. Managing editor Kim Bui shared some lessons from nearly two years at reported.ly.
- As well as the partner network news, First Draft is delighted to join Pro Publica’s Electionland project, reporting some of the uncovered stories around the US election in November. You can read our announcement about that here.
- Twitter made some updates to Tweetdeck, so you can now filter tweets by date and location in search columns. It’s not perfect, but it is worth getting to grips with.
What else was there?
Poynter put together a round up for everyone who missed the Online News Association conference in Denver last week; NPR’s excellent social media deskhas some tips and lessons around using live video; Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network announced a global set of principles; Wired published a worrying piece on whether or not people actually listen listen to fact-checkers; the New York Times looked at the growing amount of violent imagery flooding the internet; the Coral Project revealed its latest community managing tool; and Bellingcat raised some suggestions for covering “coercion and corruption” around the Russian election.
Hundreds of people shared a video over the weekend claiming to show fraud during this year’s Russian election. A little investigation with Video Vault (our new favourite tool) and it quickly became clear the video was from 2012. Coercion and corruption there may or may not be, but that video is old.
The roadside bomb in New York on Saturday again brought out the fake victim hoaxers, a topic we’ve covered before that seems to gain traction with each large, tragic news event. It is a disturbing trend and a reminder that, especially on the internet, if something looks like news and sounds like news, that doesn’t necessarily make it so.
Until next week, all the best and stay true,
Alastair
Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
@ajreid
