How Everyone Can Help Build More Trustworthy Journalism in 2016

Photo by Paul Stein, used via creative commons

In 2015 I was one of the founding members of the new First Draft News coalition. The coalition was designed to bring together some of the leading people and organizations working in breaking news, verifcation and eye witness media to build tools and trainings to help foster more accurate and trustworthy news and information.

All the members of the First Draft Coalition wrote about what they hope to see in 2016, and my focus was on how anyone can help fact check information flowing over social media. Whether you are in a newsroom, a classroom or just watching breaking news unfold on Twitter you we need you to become a verification junkie.

For the full round up of 2016 predictions from Storyful, Reported.ly, Meedan, Eyewitness Media Hub and more go here. This is what I said:

We need you. If you have ever helped a friend install Firefox, or set up a back-up system on your parents’ computer. We need you. If you’ve ever helped a colleague use spreadsheets, or taught a neighbor how to tweak Facebook’s privacy settings. We need you.

Verification and fact-checking are catching on, but not fast enough. Newsrooms should be teaching their communities. Journalism schools should be training their students. Journalists should be modeling best practices. In an age of participatory media it is up to all of us to help give the facts a fighting chance. Verification is increasingly a basic skill of digital literacy and a necessary aptitude of life online.

In 2016 we need you to learn how to verify photos, videos and eyewitness reports during breaking news. Then we need you to teach someone else. Spread the gospel of fact checking. Cultivate skepticism. Evangelize accuracy.

Now journalists and newsrooms are increasingly working together and sharing information during breaking news, to help improve coverage, serve communities, and get accurate information out to people who need it.

Yes, there is still a race to be first. Yes, there is still a lot of duplicated efforts. Yes, every eyewitness on Twitter still gets flooded by a deluge of journalists. But through projects like the First Draft News Coalition and the American Press Institutes Fact Checking work, people committed to accuracy and truth are working together to strengthen the entire field.

We need that collaborative work to move out from behind the scenes and into practice during breaking news. Working together across newsrooms, social media editors and real-time journalists can help slow the spread of misinformation, more quickly verify user generated content, and more efficiently and empathetically work with eyewitnesses on the ground.

Josh Stearns is the director of Journalism and Sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the founder of VerificationJunkie.com, a growing director of tools for verifying eyewitness media. Follow him on Twitter at @jcstearns.

Director, Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund. Journalism and democracy of, by and for the people. Formerly: @grdodge @freepress

Director, Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund. Journalism and democracy of, by and for the people. Formerly: @grdodge @freepress