Social Journalism and ElectionLand

Students will be monitoring voting problems for Election 2016

So excited that we finally get to announce that socialj students will be participating in a social newsgathering and verification project to monitor problems at the polls, along with a whole host of impressive partners like ProPublica, WNYC, Univision, the USA TODAY Network, and more.

When the indomitable Claire Wardle of Columbia told me about this then-super-secret plan earlier this summer, it seemed like a great way for students to get real-world training on one of the most critical skills in our profession, the painstaking task of verifying information that today comes at us from a whole variety of different sources.

And they would get to do it alongside a team of experienced journalists on an issue close to the heart of why most of us went into this business in the first place, the preservation of a a free and democratic society in which citizens govern themselves. Pretty grandiose, yeah, but that’s what this is all about!

Scott Klein of ProPublica writes better about the project than I can, and here’s a press release that includes a list of other participating schools. Can’t wait to work with colleagues around the country and at the school I used to teach at, the University of Memphis.

I will try to share some things we learn along the way here, and my students will as well.

Claire Wardle of Columbia University teaches social newsgathering and verification skills to social journalism students at CUNY-J

We’ve never tried this before. so it is possible things will go wrong. It’s possible social signals won’t tell us as much as we hope, or that there will be fewer voting problems than expected (let’s hope, but I doubt it, sadly). But I think we will learn a lot regardless and hopefully provide an important public service.

My social journalism students have already done two training sessions on social newsgathering and verification with Mandy Jenkins of Storyful and Wardle of Columbia and FirstDraft. If you are interested in learning/teaching more about this I would recommend:

1. Check out The First Draft Coalition’s site. It is full of resources and guidelines for dealing with all forms of eyewitness media.
2. Start with a couple of exercises prepared by FirstDraft to get practice. Here is an observation challenge and a geolocation challenge that Claire did with my group.
3. Check out Storyful’s array of case studies that examine how they do this work.