And the winners are … Electionland and CrossCheck!
Ambitious collaborative reporting projects run using Check win Online Journalism Awards
We are incredibly honored to be involved with the amazing teams behind Electionland & CrossCheck — both announced as Online Journalism Award winners at this year’s Online News Association conference banquet!
Electionland won in the 2017 Planned News/Events (Large Newsroom) category, while CrossCheck won the 2017 Planned News/Events (Small Newsroom) award. In both projects, Check was the verification and fact-checking workbench used by reporters and students to verify eyewitness media, check facts, and debunk misinformation.
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Electionland was the largest-ever journalistic collaboration around a single event, with some 1,100 journalists taking part in a nationwide effort to cover voting rights, election administration, and whether the 2016 election was “rigged.”
“Electionland proved that social media can be a valuable reporting tool at a very large scale, and provided an immediate and authoritative rebuttal to suggestions that the vote was illegitimate or that there had been widespread intimidation of people going to the polls. In a hotly contentious election in which the facts themselves seemed to be in dispute, hard evidence was an extraordinary public service.”
Find out more about the project here: The Electionland Playbook: Lessons from a 1000–person collaborative journalism project and Checking the Vote: How Check Was Used During Electionland
CrossCheck is an online verification newsroom collaboration that was inspired by Electionland, an initiative in which First Draft partnered with ProPublica. We wanted to build on that project by supporting mainstream newsrooms to collaboratively verify rumors in real time. Our first project brought together 37 newsroom and five technology partners in France and the UK to help accurately report false, misleading and confusing claims that circulated online in the ten weeks leading up to the French Presidential election in May 2017.
Check, Meedan’s open source collaborative verification and fact checking platform, provided a central workbench facilitating this collaboration, allowing participating journalists and editors a simple and powerful framework to work together to investigate and annotate links, media and claims.
Learn more about the project here, CrossCheck launches to combat false information ahead of elections in France and This tool is helping newsrooms collaborate on factchecking and verification projects.
In what has been a great week for us, Meedan was also announced as a recipient of ‘2017 ONA Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education’ in partnership with The Reynolds School at University of Nevada, Reno and Reno Public Radio,. We will be working on ways to build a student-led pipeline for newsgathering, translation, and verification to strengthen local reporting on immigration issues, with the goal of building trust among immigrant audiences.
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