The truth sandwich: Repeating a lie helps it to live on, writes Craig Newmark.
“I predict that, in 2019, news organizations will start to institute new reporting methods to avoid being complicit. Tactics may include adopting the ‘truth sandwich,’ which means covering a lie by presenting the truth first and then following that lie with a fact-check, as well as increasing newsroom capacity to check claims for accuracy in real time, prior to publishing a story.”
Regaining public trust in journalism: “News organizations and journalism educators should teach members of the public (and their own journalists) how to stop being used as pawns in the meta-game of online disinformation,” writes Marie Shanahan.
“One antidote to modern information gamesmanship is more ethics and professional reporting.”
News dying, not journalism: News is losing its cultural relevance after two centuries, writes Hossein Derakhshan.
“The challenge for journalism in the years to come is to reinvent itself around something other than news, whilst resisting the seduction of propaganda and entertainment,” he writes.
“Innovation in journalism should not only be about business models or technology, it should be also about radically new culture forms and representation formats.”
Tweets come back to bite: College students beware of the future impact of tweets.
Sydney Smith reports that CNN White House reporter Kaitlan Collins apologized for her “ignorant language” in 2011 tweets while she was in college, calling it “immature.”
Feminist fact-finding: Daniel Funke describes a project “going after false claims and online information about gender issues” in Europe.
“FemFacts is aimed at tackling some of the false narratives about women published by European media,” Funke writes.
Twitter pros and cons: A research article by Shannon McGregor and Logan Molyneux reports that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, leading to “pack journalism”
Upside is “a wider array of voices into the mainstream news agenda.”
Twitter plays a key role in journalistic practices, they write. “Twitter’s growing centrality in the news process warrants greater scrutiny from journalists and scholars.”
Media bullying: Alexandria Neason and Nausicaa Renner comment on media intimidation of Prof. Christine Blasey Ford.
“Journalists spend much of our professional lives wading through justifications for our subjects’ behavior and asking when has it crossed an ethical line,” they write. “This hearing shows the urgent need for us to examine our own.”
Using digital media to debunk or verify news: Mathew Ingram tells how BBC’s Africa bureau linked Cameroon soldiers to the deaths of two women and two children.
Ingram calls it “an inspiring use of digital journalism” leading to seven arrests.
YouTube a conspiracy ecosystem: Craig Timberg and Drew Harwell write about wild conspiracies that flood YouTube.
“Among the most popular genres in the collection were related to mass shootings, and especially the one in Las Vegas in October that killed 58 people,” they write. “Typically these portrayed the attacks as politically motivated hoaxes, so called ‘false flags’ intended to dupe the public into believing that gun rights needed to be curtailed.” The 50 most widely viewed mass-shooting conspiracy videos were viewed 50 million times.
The enduring weather person: Andrew McCormick observes that weather reporters entertain audiences in fair weather and counsel them in bad.
“It isn’t completely surprising that they would be in demand as storms loom,” he writes. “But it is notable, in the age of Twitter and smart phones, that the broadcast TV weather person — analog, local, old-school — has stayed so viable.”
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 