How not to be distracted by the lies of the powerful

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

🔔 Pleased to announce our first +450 speakers #ijf17. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!

• “Journalism After Snowden” examines the changing power dynamics between reporters and government. “In the age of heightened surveillance, the need for — and threat to — watchdog journalism has intensified, with Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of classified documents signaling what may become a new norm in national security coverage.” The book, edited by Emily Bell and Taylor Owen, includes a conversation between Bell and Snowden.
  🔔 Taylor Owen will be a #ijf17 speaker
• This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy. ”The news provokes outrage every day, but it rarely inspires sustained resistance. Now that Donald Trump has launched a frontal assault on democracy, the press needs to fundamentally change tack. Journalists have to beat historians to the punch and write history — before it repeats itself,” according to Rob Wijnberg (De Correspondent).
  🔔 Rob Wijnberg will be a #ijf17 speaker
• The massacre that wasn’t, and a turning point for ‘fake news’. The same internet that enabled false stories to run unchecked through news feeds during the election year dispatched new white blood cells that attacked Ms. Conway’s ‘alternate facts’ with ‘true facts’ (a redundant term that I guess we’re stuck with for now),” wrote Jim Rutenberg. “Their most effective attack was traditional reporting, in many cases from news organizations that have doubled down on fact-checking, joined by newfangled memes that accentuate the truth.”
• Fake news for liberals: misinformation starts to lean left under Trump. Media and communications experts suspect those dynamics could shift under Trump. In an interview with the Atlantic, Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, said she had seen a spike in the amount and popularity of fake news directed toward liberal audiences.
• Lessons from Russia: how fake news and misinformation distract journalists. “But what’s the alternative? Ignoring lies and fake news is surrender. The challenge for indep­endent news organizat­ions is finding that balance between systematically fact-checking, but also pursuing important stories about corruption, national security and other topics in the public interest.”
• Fact-checking isn’t enough. To fight the far right, the media must spread the truth. “Donald Trump has accused the ‘dishonest’ press of under-reporting terrorist attacks. To counter this narrative, we must be more effective in reflecting reality,” suggests Martin Belam. “Fact-checking their spurious claims is one thing — but what does it achieve? To really challenge the spread of this nonsense we need to work out what we are going to do about more effectively spreading the truth.”
  🔔 Martin Belam will be a #ijf17 speaker
• “If we run, or amplify on Twitter, stories about Trump that are not true we will harm our own credibility,” says David Fahrenthold. “It’s hard to know what’s true with Trump because often the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, the spokespeople may not tell you the truth — but the truth is all we have, [why] people care about us and read us, and there’s been some examples where people push stories that later on turn out to have not been fully checked, or turn out not to be true.”
• Collaboration is the key to stalling the rise of fake news and reversing its stranglehold on the internet. “We must be working together to verify,” said Claire Wardle, who leads strategy and research at First Draft. “When newsrooms are duplicating the effort of other newsrooms, we need to be collaborating at the verification stage.”
  🔔 Claire Wardle will be a #ijf17 speaker
• How digital researchers can shed light on the information politics of the ‘post-truth’ era. Digital media played a prominent role in the recent US presidential election, with social media platforms channelling previously fringe universes of political culture, rooted in populism and post-truth politics, right into the mainstream of US political discourse. Liliana Bounegru outlines examples of approaches that help to assist digital researchers, data journalists, civil society groups and others looking to increase public understanding of these phenomena.
  🔔 Liliana Bounegru will be a #ijf17 speaker
• How data journalism helped establish the ICIJ as a top investigative newsroom. In recent years, data has become an indispensable source for journalists and news organisations, providing excellent material for investigative work as well as storytelling. This has led to the emergence of data journalism, which, broadly speaking, uses information science and analytical techniques in conjunction with journalistic workflows to produce compelling stories rooted in data.
  🔔 Mar Cabra will be a #ijf17 speaker
  🔔 Bahareh Heravi will be a #ijf17 speaker
• Azerbaijan’s Khadija Ismayilova describes extreme measures to keep her from speaking to European Parliament event by video. Ismayilova was detained in December 2014 and later sentenced to 7 years in prison on charges that were widely seen as retaliation for her award-winning reporting on the wealth of Azerbaijani president and his family. Since her release in May 2016, she has continued to openly criticize corruption in Azerbaijan and conducted other journalistic investigations
  🔔 Khadija Ismayilova will speak (via Skype) at #ijf17
• Commenters tend to be the most invested and dedicated of all readers, says Mary Hamilton, The Guardian’s executive editor for audience. “That method of engagement, if done well and if done with commitment and understanding of where it fits specifically can be hugely valuable to the organization.” Aron Pilhofer, who was The Guardian’s executive editor of digital before joining the faculty of the School of Media and Communication at Temple University last summer, considers audience engagement to be “fundamentally core to any publication that considers conversion to be an important thing. By that I mean paywall, subscriptions, membership, or donations.”
  🔔 Mary Hamilton will be a #ijf17 speaker
  🔔 Aron Pilhofer will be a #ijf17 speaker
• Retreating back to print newspapers isn’t just a bad idea; it’s institutional suicide, according to Aron Pilhofer. “The primary driver of print revenue has traditionally been advertisers who buy based on the newspapers’ ability to reach an audience they wish to reach. And by every measure, I’m sorry to say, newspapers are less and less effective at delivering that audience than the alternatives — principally Facebook and Google, which are vacuuming up more and more ad dollars that once flowed to print. Now is the time to double, triple, quadruple down on digital, not retreat from it. To paraphrase Shirky, we have to stop conflating ‘saving journalism’ with ‘saving newspapers’. They are not the same thing.”
• Quality news shifts to a paid-for model. And that’s a good thing. But “these brands are stuck in an antiquated ‘captive model’ in which the customer has no choice but to surrender to their mediocre system. In doing so, they miss two crucial elements: One, the choice to get my news has never been wider: today, being deprived of the WSJ or the FT is much less painful than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Two, when it comes to customer service, me and 244 million Amazon customers, 150 million iTunes and 74 million Netflix subscribers have references that set a high bar for expectations,” wrote Frederic Filloux.
• innovateAFRICA.fund has selected 22 digital projects for $1 million in seed grants and technology support to tackle issues as diverse as fake news and frontline war reporting, as well as innovative ways for watchdog media to use ‘bots, drones and sensors to improve their reportage. innovateAFRICA is currently the largest fund for digital journalism experimentation in Africa, and is managed by Code for Africa, as part of the International Center for Journalists’ (ICFJ) wider data journalism initiative in Africa.
  🔔 Justin Arenstein will be a #ijf17 speaker
• Twitter just introduced new ways to fight abuse. “We’re taking steps to identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts. This focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of behavior, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others.”
• Wikipedia have banned Daily Mail as an ‘unreliable’ source. The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as the Kremlin-backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.

International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia.