Games, apps, plug-ins — building tools to fight for facts
The fight against misinformation continues and the Media Literacy Toolkit for Newsroom held their final unconference in Lisbon, before continuing with a hackathon to produce the tools of the toolkit. The Media Literacy Toolkit by the Global Editors Network is a long and sustained effort to support trust and truth in media by empowering news producers and news users.
Round three of the Media Literacy Toolkit for Newsroom kicked off in sunny Lisbon, together with our local partner AP Imprensa, the Portuguese press association. The Lisbon unconference, the last one in a series of unconferences, continued where we left off in Vienna: Brainstorming about the tools which should be part of the Media Literacy Toolkit.
The Lisbon Unconference
For this unconference, participants had to think of tools which fit the needs of each
audience group to support newsrooms in increasing media literacy in their readers.
After the unconference in Brussels and Vienna, the Lisbon unconference is the final one to focus on brainstorming different tools, after that phase, the Global Editors Network will host a hackathon to produce the media literacy tools the
participants in Lisbon came up with. That is why the focus of the Lisbon unconference
was on creating technical guidelines of the tools for developers to build.
Building trust through games
Based on what the participant in the Vienna unconference came up with, Diogo Queiroz de Andrade hosted a masterclass on the gamification approach of media literacy. According to the former creative director of Observador.pt, it is important to start educating citizens as early as possible, with the support of all stakeholders in the educational process (from the ministry of education to parents and teachers). Diogo suggests tapping into the power of (video) games to strengthen and support the exchange of knowledge and information on media literacy and critical thinking.
After getting some inspiration and insights on Game Media Literacy, or Game Literacy, participants split into three working groups, focusing on one target group each: Teenagers, journalism students, and journalists.
The participants brainstormed within their teams about possible media literacy tools that fit to the respective audiences, focusing on what the needs for each groups are, and how to support them best to enhance their media literacy skills.
“Sometimes it takes a professional to detect misinformation and who does the work for you”
Since this toolkit’s goal is to support newsroom in enhancing their reader’s media literacy skills, Amien Essif, digital reporter for Deutsche Welle, presented a short lightning talk after lunch. They are using a tool called Truly Media, a web-based collaborative platform designed to find, organise, and verify UGC online. This tool allows journalists to fact-check images, videos, and other content generated by users online, and to verify if these sources are reliable and able to be published and included in the news.
He stresses the fact that everybody needs a certain level of media and news literacy, but journalists — trained professionals — are still needed to debunk misinformation.
The Guidelines
After the lightning talk, the teams moved on to the next stage: Having thought of tools for each audience group it was time to come up with technical guidelines. Participants created requirements and guidelines as reference points as developers produce the tools which newsrooms can use to educate readers in media literacy and to promote trust and transparency
in media.
Team 1 focused on a video game for teenagers. The goal is to teach children and teenagers how to distinguish between reliable news and misinformation by checking sources and verifying information in a fun and encouraging way.
Team 2 wants to build an online and mobile app for journalism students and professors: The app helps students of journalism establish a guideline for critical reading of an article by answering questions and analysing the articles their professors have posted. The app should be able to open any text article and format so that it can guide the student through the reading experience and provide relevant questions that the student is encourage to answer. It’s an interactive reading experience and also allows collaboration so that students within a class could see each others comments/answers, while teachers are able to post questions.
Team 3 focused a plug-in for journalists and newsrooms with a potential machine learning model: The goal is to streamline processes and to support journalists producing better and more accurate content by easily showing the writer (and also reader) an overview analysis of the article.
The plug-in should be able to help streamlining publication processes in the backend by showing a checklist before the article gets published. The tools help journalists to be more aware of the processes and to enhance transparency of their work, by making sure that the content, links, media, data,
sources, etc. are verified.
One major thing participants have to keep in mind is that the tools should be easily translatable for different newsrooms in different European countries to use.
What’s next?
The guidelines and specifications of the functionalities should act as a framework for developers who will be invited to the Media Literacy Toolkit Hackathon in Paris. The developers will create the working prototypes of the suggested tools during a 2-day hackathon and to build the first version of tools to educate readers in media literacy and to promote trust and transparency in media. The working prototypes will be presented during the GEN Summit in Athens in the session Media Literacy for Journalists: New tools and new ways to fight misinformation with their audiences.
To learn more about our calls-to-action for the European Media Literacy Toolkit for Newsrooms, visit our website. If you’re interested in participating, or know someone who has expertise on the matter, do not hesitate to contact us to get involved and follow #GENMediaLit for an updated view on the programme over the year.
