One story, 15 corrections: The Washington Post is embarrassed by widespread errors in a freelance article about two African-American families, writes Sydney Smith.
Errors included misspellings, family details, omissions of key details and statements, descriptions of incidents, context and allegations.
Recognizing satire: “People have long mistaken satire for real news,” write R. Kelly Garrett, Robert Bond and Shannon Poulsen.
Satirical newspapers found to be quoted as factual. Democrats and republicans fooled. Americans think made-up news is a significant problem.
Collaborative data journalism: ProPublica launches a guidebook on allowing hundreds of people to access and work with a shared pool of data, writes Rachel Glickhouse.
It includes how to start newsroom collaborations, ways to collaborate and managing workflows. Taking on enormous projects with hundreds of journalists.
Detecting deepfake videos: Fake videos pose a grave threat to the 2020 elections, writes Olivia Beavers, unless media adopt policies to tell real videos from forgeries.
“In the internet age, newsrooms have scrutinized images and videos to determine whether they are authentic or fake,” she writes. “But deepfakes will be a more difficult challenge, particularly because artificial intelligence makes the authenticity of such videos indistinguishable to the human eye and forgeries harder to detect.”
Reporting hate speech, violence and terrorism: The Public Media Alliance of journalists in South East Asia adopts guidelines for covering hate speech, violence and terrorism.
An action plan workshop developed policies beginning with definitions leading to “how journalists and media professionals should respond to such situations.”
Mass shootings spawn misinformation: Fact-checking the El Paso and Dayton shootings revealed three findings, write Daniel Funke, Susan Benkelman and Cristina Tardaguila.
Conspiracy mongering, rumors via messaging apps and hoaxes abound.
Critique the critics: Columbia Journalism Review thinks critically about the role of criticism.
“Do we need professional critics?” it asks. “There is something useful they can do: Show people what’s missing in their culture.”
Ethical aggregation tips: Kelly McBride tells how to aggregate ethically: Transparent attribution, add value, percentages matter and create a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Retiring superannuated: Merrill Perlman traces the origins and uses of the word “superannuated,” and decides it should be used seldom.
Keeping the usage to once in an “annum” or so would be super, he writes.
Imagining journalism’s audience: The digital age did not sharpen newsroom perceptions of their target audiences, writes James G. Robinson.
“The central irony of the newsroom is that while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind, the audiences for their work often remain unfocused, imagined abstractions, built on long-held assumptions, newsroom folklore and imperfect inference,” he writes, based on a Tow Center for Digital Journalism report.
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 