Discussion of media/veracity/authenticity tools for SFUAd media and storytelling course fall 2016

1. Media Shifts
The marriage (and divorce) of content and technology

2. Content in the 21st century
 Traditional media relied on traditional modes of delivery: free
papers, subscriptions, some cross-promotions between
media outlets
 The Internet shifted these models, requiring traditional
media to adopt new modes of circulation, in large part
through social media
 This lead to new modes of tracking: page views, viral stats,
trend-spotting, as well a new modes of considering
“engagement”
 This also created a greater push for UG—user-generated
content as the Internet created opportunities for “everyone”
to fill roles previously held by professionals.

3. Industry Shifts
 You can’t create anything without the story itself, but in the
wild west of the Internet, “story” became “content”
 This lead to the creation of many companies (some thriving,
some to-be-seen) that look at ways to both leverage content
and help content creators “package” and share their work
 Content creators suddenly didn’t mean just professional
journalists, but anyone with Internet access could upload a
video, live Tweet a story, write something, post something
on FB etc. etc.
 As with most things, there’s good sides to this and perhaps
less good sides.

4. UGC
 “Amateur Footage” report studied eight channels using
UGC content for 21 days, eight hours a day, to analyze
usage: was it used, in what form, credited as such
 They found only used when nothing else was available,
but did not consistently label it as UGC

5. From the Report
“Over the past decade some of the world’s most important
news stories have been covered using photographs or
video shot by eyewitnesses. From photos taken on
camera phones by passengers being led to safety through
the underground tunnels in the immediate aftermath of the
London bombings on July 7, 2005, to the videos of police
shooting protestors in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti
(Independence Square) in early 2014, UGC has become
an increasingly regular feature of news output both on
television and the Web.”

6. Main Conclusions
 That UGC is used consistently by news sources,
although mostly when no other content is available
 Has been used greatly to cover the war in Syria
 Is often un-credited as such
Why is this problematic? Or potentially problematic?

7. Internet and Truth
 “In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher
in a “post-fact” age. Eight years later, in the death
throes of an election that features a candidate who
once led the campaign to lie about President Obama’s
birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the
online age.”
 —Farhad Manjoo, Nov. 2, The New York Times,
“How the Internet is Loosening our Grip on the
Truth”

8. I blame Facebook
 Because it’s its fault:
 “Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites
are consistently feeding their millions of followers false
or misleading information, according to an analysis by
BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts
from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected
from the right and from the left also found that the least
accurate pages generated some of the highest
numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on
Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream
political news pages analyzed for comparison.” —
Buzzfeed,

9. Advice: Triple-Check
 Don’t blame “the media.” Check, recheck and check again
when you come across content. Check its sourcing. Use
online tools to do so.
 And, yes, Snopes is a good source.
 Exercise for today: We are going to go into the lab. You are
going to look on your social media networks and find a story
on Snopes. Read through its analysis. See if you can also
follow the trail of the story. Then be prepared to share the
story in class. Would you have believed it without
verification? What were some signs you should or should
not have?

10. On the other hand…Storyful
 Storyful: international company. “There’s never been a
better time to be a storyteller.”
 Merging of technology, journalism and social media; it
was founded by journalists
 Storyful describes itself as the first social news agency

11. What they do
 Storyful’s golden rule is that there is always someone
closer to the story. We are not experts in every subject.
We find the people who are.
 When they discover compelling content – video,
photos, maps or tweets – Storyful journalists search for
the key details, data and context that will help clients
safely use the content in their broadcasts or on their
websites. Storyful delivers a range of hand-curated and
automated content feeds through a web dashboard or
directly into a client’s content management system
(CMS).

12. What they say they do
 Engagement with the member of the community who shared the video in an
effort to establish the identity of the original uploader.
 Translation of every word that comes with a video for additional context.
 Review of the uploader’s history to see whether he/she has shared useful and
credible content in the past, or if he/she is simply ‘scraping’ other people’s
videos.
 Use of Google street view/maps/satellite imagery to help verify the locations in
a video.
 Consultation with other news sources to confirm events in a video happened
as they were described.
 Examination of key features in a video such as weather and background
landscape to see if they match known facts on the ground.

13. Let’s look at two examples
 Tracking down someone who uploaded a video at a
One Direction show
 Verification of content
 Spotting content with viral potential for news
organizations

14. Not the only ones
 Amnesty International now has a Citizen Evidence Lab,
designed to help anyone investigate the veracity of
online videos.
 The site also has a toolbox of verification resources to
look at maps, images and more.
 Includes a verification exercise, which I’m hoping we
will have time to do possibly next week.
 Lots of other tools; for now: Checkdesk

15. At the same time…
 While UGC grows along with the industry around it, so
do tools for professional “content creators,” including
journalists:
 Tools for finding information and data
 Tools for publishing and sharing stories

16. MuckRock
“MuckRock is a collaborative news site that gives you the
tools to keep our government transparent and
accountable.”
Two tools for reporters and citizens are FOIA and state
information laws. In NM, those laws are called IPRA and
OMA
Muckrock helps individual citizens and reporters file
requests, but also crowdfunds requests for larger projects

17. Trend toward collaborative
gatekeeping
ProPublica:
“ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that
produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories,
stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing
journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak
by the strong and on the failures of those with power to
vindicate the trust placed in them.”

18. Background
ProPublica was founded by Paul Steiger, the former managing
editor of The Wall Street Journal. It is now led by Stephen
Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian and
former investigative editor of The New York Times, and Richard
Tofel, the former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
“It is true that the number and variety of publishing platforms
are exploding in the Internet age. But very few of these entities
are engaged in original reporting. In short, we face a situation
in which sources of opinion are proliferating, but sources of
facts on which those opinions are based are shrinking. The
former phenomenon is almost certainly, on balance, a societal
good; the latter is surely a problem.”

19. Projects
 Award-winning stories on topics ranging from rape to
police to workman’s comp
 Report and publish stories with deep investigations and
rich in data
 Offer these for free under licensing that allows them to
be reused and adapted for local use by other
publications
 Provides its data, for free when it comes from a public
source

20. Platforms for Content
 Last but not least, new platforms for presenting content, increasingly focused
on creation vs. metrics
“Medium is a vibrant network of thinkers who care about the world and making it
better — through their craft, their stories, and their ideas. More than a network of
thinkers, though, Medium is a network of thought. Connecting people together
increases their knowledge and capabilities. Connecting ideas together increases
their value, as well. Medium is not for everybody, but it’s open to everybody. It
encourages participation and a diversity of opinion. Anyone can earn influence on
Medium via the value of their ideas, thoughtfulness of their responses, or quality
of their rhetoric.”
 Medium:
 Prioritizes presentation
 Prioritizes interaction and community
 Used to offer writing prompts

21. Atavist
“Atavist was founded by Evan (a writer), Nick (an editor),
and Jeff (a programmer) back in 2011, when conventional
wisdom held that “the end of the attention span” was upon
us and that “the death of longform” was imminent.
Together with the diverse and talented team of
developers, editors, designers, and other creative folk
now gathered at Atavist HQ in Brooklyn, we believed
instead that the web could be a thriving home for deeper
stories, beautiful design, and innovative publications. So
we built a software platform to make it all possible, and a
magazine to show how it’s done.”

22. Atavist Examples
 Atavist is used by a spectrum of creators: from
professional journalists to everyday
writers/photographers
 Also offers tiered plans and publication options; newish
Facebook integration
 Is a software/platform for everyone, and then uses its
own software to publish its own award-winning
magazine.
 Won a National Magazine award for Love and Ruin

23. For your project
 First: Sign up for Atavist
 You can upload your story in Word Doc, but not PDF;
you can also copy and paste
 Use as many of the available multimedia elements as
possible: video, audio, photography
 Atavist is essentially an online CMS: let’s take a tour
 Here’s how it looks, but you’ll want to play around; it’s
very user friendly.

24. Next Week
 In class, work on putting together as much of your
Atavist project as possible. They’ll be evaluated for
your use of its tools—but that doesn’t mean just dump
a bunch of stuff in it.
 You will ultimately share your Atavist piece via a link on
your blog, and it will be part of your final web portfolio
 As we move toward the end of the semester, you’ll also
want to start thinking about finalizing your web portfolio.

25. Finalizing Web Portfolio
 Clean up any existing work for typos or edits
 Make final Instagram essay on “Wild Card” topic
 Finish your Atavist project
 Write a brief (500 words) intro to your blog that discusses your use of these
tools this semester. Post this on your blog under your “About”
 Prepare to present your portfolio in class on Dec. 7. All portfolios should be
finished by Dec. 7. Everyone is responsible for looking at each blog prior to
presentations and coming with comments and questions. You will have time in
class the week prior (Nov. 30) to work on these as well.
 Presentation will include showing your work, discussing how you feel it
succeeded/ challenges/ how the format used worked/didn’t work with the
material. This will include us watching all your videos in class that day, which I
will have prepared in advance.

26. Final Paper
 You will be analyzing the ways in which Serial and In
Cold Blood make use of various elements of creative
nonfiction.
 As a reminder, we will have a seminar on the final day
of class and listen to the final episode of Serial together
prior to discussing.
 So you have some time, but the final paper parameters
are on the website if you want to start thinking about it.