Fake news vs real censorship, reimagining photojournalism for a digital future, and automated journalism in real life
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
4 min readMar 3, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
🔔 Pleased to announce our first 500+ confirmed #ijf18 speakers. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!
- When fighting fake news aids censorship. “Laws meant to curb hate speech, violence, or ‘fake news’ may be well intentioned [but] implementation has been sloppy, with few mechanisms to ensure accountability, transparency, or reversibility. Governments are outsourcing censorship. […] Around the world, the number of honest journalists jailed for publishing fake or fictitious news is at an all-time high of at least 21. As non-democratic leaders increasingly use the ‘fake news’ backlash to clamp down on independent media, that number is likely to climb.”
- Turkey’s journalists have sacrificed their freedom in the pursuit of truth. “With 156 journalists behind bars as of 26 February 2018 and the closing down of more than 150 media outlets by virtue of the state’s of emergency decrees, Turkey is the global leader in suppressing the media.”
- Iran arrests two journalists covering crackdown on religious protests. Reza Entessari and Kasra Nouri, reporters with the Sufi news website Majzooban-e-Noor, were covering the violent dispersal of religious protests in Tehran. Both journalists have previously served time in jail in retaliation for their work, according to CPJ research, and were both were granted early releases in 2015.
- Three publications are suing the EU over fake news allegations. In EUvsDisinfo’s case, Peter Burger, coordinator of Nieuwscheckers and an assistant professor at Leiden University, said the tendency to label anything remotely pro-Kremlin as disinformation is damaging to everyday journalism.
- How photojournalism can survive the digital revolution (and your short attention span). “How many photographs have crossed your screen today? Dozens? Hundreds? How many have you looked at? How many did you really ‘see’?”
🔔 Jeff Israely, Francesco Zizola and Francesca Sears will be #ijf18 speakers
- Inside Time’s decision to dedicate an entire issue to the opioid epidemic. This week, Time published a magazine that is, cover-to-cover, the work of Time’s deputy editor of photography Paul Moakley and photojournalist James Nachtwey. There is no advertising in this issue. Just page after heartbreaking page of photographs and text that calculate the human toll of the American opioid epidemic that kills 64,000 people a year.
- The ethical challenges of immersive journalism. “Questions of ethics and transparency are growing among journalists and scholars, as media companies increasingly experiment with the power of VR and augmented reality (AR.) Both technological advances allow users to interact personally with news reports via the creation of virtual scenes viewed through headsets.”
🔔 We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18, with Marc Ellison, Joe Inwood, Viktorija Mickute and Joffrey Monnier
- Iona Craig won a Polk Award for her investigation of a SEAL Team raid that killed women and children in Yemen. This is a description of how Craig reported the story, which was both a major exposé that revealed the Trump administration lied about its first major military engagement, and an epic 1,000-mile journey through desolate parts of Yemen, where Craig and her Yemeni companions faced lethal risks. She was not only the first foreign journalist to report from al Ghayil, she remains the only one to have done so. It is a lesson, to students as well as skeptics of journalism, in what it takes to report an investigative article into wrongful killings by the U.S. military in a far-off battle zone. It is also a demonstration of how independent journalists are able to uncover important truths missed by traditional reporters who rely too heavily on official accounts coming from Washington.
🔔 Iona Craig will be a #ijf18 speaker
- With in-article chat bots, BBC is experimenting with new ways to introduce readers to complex topics. “For us, this is a way to let people read and ask questions at their own pace, instead of having them read through long screens of text. Often people aren’t engaged in stories because they haven’t had the right context.”
- Journalism and artificial intelligence: some notes. “Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help the news media with its three core problems: The overabundance of information and sources that leave the public confused; The credibility of journalism in a world of disinformation and falling trust and literacy; The Business model crisis — how can journalism become more efficient — avoiding duplication; be more engaged, add value and be relevant to the individual’s and communities’ need for quality, accurate information and informed, useful debate. But like any technology they can also be used by bad people or for bad purposes: in journalism that can mean clickbait, misinformation, propaganda, and trolling.”
🔔 Charlie Beckett will be a #ijf18 speaker - A new fact sheet from the Reuters Institute takes stock of automated fact-checking around the world — and the future looks bright. The report draws upon interviews with fact-checkers and computer scientists, as well as an overview of existing technology, to detail how automated fact-checking could change the practice in the immediate future.
🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 (here and here) with Bill Adair, Phoebe Arnold, Sam Dubberley, Tom Felle, Mandy Jenkins and Jochen Spangenberg.
