Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: Storyful

Ending one era, and starting another

By

On June 1, 2018

In My Work

Today is a bittersweet one, as it is my last day at Storyful before I go off to start a new chapter of my career.

I joined Storyful early enough to be hired on by the founders, but late enough to get health insurance. I leave it now, nearly four years later, as a bigger, better and much more grown up company.

My first day at Storyful back in July of 2014

My first day at Storyful back in July of 2014

While I’d been a part of media startups before, I never got to see one through its adolescence until I got here. The experience has been what it must be like to be a stepparent – you weren’t there at the beginning, but after surviving some critical developmental milestones together, you do your best to leave a lasting and positive impression.

In one of my interviews to join the company back in 2014, I said I would work to grow Storyful’s reputation in the media industry beyond that of a UGC video service, but rather to be seen as a respected, social-centric newsroom known for bringing real stories to the surface. I think we did that – and a lot more – with more to come as Storyful continues to grow its portfolio in the analysis of online communities and disinformation.

In the past few years, the media, technology and business spheres have taken an increased interest in the power of social movements, and thus, in the work of Storyful. We were seeking the stories behind the stories on social media long before “fake news” ever became a watchword.

It’s been an exciting (and exhausting) era in social journalism. I started at Storyful the day after MH-17 went down over Ukraine. In the years since then, we’ve covered the war in Syria, the 2016 campaign trail, the rise of nationalist movements in the US and Europe and too many terrorist attacks, school shootings and natural disasters to list. The stories have become more socially driven, the truth less easy to find, the work more important than ever.

In preparing to leave, I spent time looking through my files and rediscovered just how far we’d come in a fairly short time. I found strategies and product concepts that never got off the ground – and many more that did. I also unearthed org charts going back to 2013, scrolling through them to see 20 name boxes jump to 30, 50 and 60 in number. Hiring and developing the careers of roughly 40 social journalists has been the most valuable experience in my time at Storyful. I’ve seen kids fresh out of university become disinformation experts, traditional journalists rediscover their passion in a new medium and newbies become mentors, editors and managers.

Much like the current generation of leading social journalists working in the industry, I wholeheartedly believe the next generation of social journalists will also be powered by Storyful. I’m so lucky to have been able to be a part of it.

—

It wouldn’t be an obligatory farewell blog post without some words of thanks.

  • To David Clinch, for introducing me to Storyful, first as a fellow social journalist, then later as a client and recruit – and for his constant support every step of the way.
  • To Mark Little and Aine Kerr for bringing me into this team and providing the inspiration for why we do what we do.
  • To Rahul Chopra for showing me how to grow and giving me room to do so.
  • To Toby Bochan for sharing every win, burden and milestone as we grew this team together.
  • To Mike Hess for continually making me look smarter than I actually am.
  • To Aifric Iremonger Mooney for keeping me from losing my mind (and keeping the proverbial trains running on time).
  • To the Storyful journalists – past and present – for everything they have taught me.
  • And to Dublin for giving me a second home that will never be far from my thoughts.

 

Alex Capaldi/DKS

On heading back to school and back to basics

By

On May 11, 2018

In My Work

I was ecstatic when I found out I was selected to join the 2018-19 fellowship class of the John S. Knight program at Stanford. It’s going to be a big change for me – of jobs and coasts – but I’m as ready as I can be.

I am pretty sure I first heard about the JSK fellowship back in 2007 and the idea of leaving a good job to go to school seemed so odd to me at that part of my career. My youthful ambition told me if I wanted to “make it”, I would never be able to take time off – nor would I want to.

But over the course of many years since then, I have met many Knight fellows and all of them, to a person, have told me how the experience changed their lives. I’ve known for years now that it was something I would want to do when the time was right. When I saw one of the themes for this year’s program was disinformation, it felt like it was meant to be.

It may seem odd to depart Storyful just a few months after being elevated to Editor in Chief, but then again, there’s never a good time to separate yourself from a job that is your whole life.

My past [nearly] four years at Storyful have been so rewarding – and a nonstop sprint. I have rarely gotten a chance to spend time digging in on the initiatives and stories that most interest me. As the newsroom has expanded its scope to include investigation into social media movements and disinformation – I haven’t had much of a chance to really get into the hands-on work the way I wish I could. Now is my chance.

In addition to my research, I plan to spend the next year or so focusing on answering some important questions for myself: What am I doing? Why does it matter? Where do I fit into the journalism industry today? What do I really want to do with the rest of my career?

You know, the easy ones.

I look forward to a year on pause. I want to read more, get outside and hike on the weekends, and just generally spend more time being present and less time juggling the emails, all-hours meetings and constant notifications that dominate my life these days.

Alex Capaldi/DKS

This is an example of how it went the last time I was in college.

I’d love to be able to revert to my college-aged self, but without the incredible angst and “working four jobs just to pay rent” part. I want to rediscover the open-mindedness I had about myself and the industry back then. Revisiting my college wardrobe would also be great (I hope cargo pants are still around!).

Best of all, as part of my agreement to join the JSK program, I agreed to publicly share my progress against my research question (more to come on that). That means this site will go back to being an active blog again, not just an occasional dumping ground for errant thoughts (though it will also be that). This should be good news for those spammers who constantly keep asking if I want a website redesign (the answer is still no).

I have a couple of weeks left at Storyful before I head out for this next chapter, but in the meantime, watch this space.

Who Determines What’s News on Facebook?

By

On January 24, 2018

In Facebook, Industry News & Notes

Mark Zuckerberg announced last week yet another change to the Facebook newsfeed. Following a contentious year that embroiled the platform in controversy, Facebook intends to give preferential treatment to news sites based on users’ feedback as to which providers are most trusted.

From Zuckerberg’s post,

“The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that’s not something we’re comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you — the community — and have your feedback determine the ranking.”

Who those users are, how they are selected and exactly how “trust” is measured remains to be revealed. News and media professionals don’t appear to have a voice in determining the authority and credibility of news sites.

That’s problematic. In the past, Facebook demonstrated clear vulnerabilities when relying on its community. In mid-2016, when Facebook fired the editors curating its Trending module to instead rely on its algorithm and user engagement around stories, the community proved itself to not be the most reliable arbiter of legitimate news. False stories from dubious sources, such as a false report indicating Megyn Kelly had been fired from Fox News for endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, immediately rose to the top. Facebook later changed Trending again to try to tackle those issues.

So far, Facebook’s attempts to police its own platform have had little impact on the mitigation of disinformation and “fake news.” The platform itself reported that over 126 million Americans saw Russian disinformation leading up to 2016 election emanating from the community. Furthermore, independent fact-checkers brought in by Facebook to flag fake stories have said efforts to stem the tide of disinformation are falling short.

Outside of Facebook’s walls, trust is a contract between the audience, who gives an investment of time and the publishers’ ability to match that with quality journalism. Handing all of that power to the “community” creates dangerous opportunities for propagandists and purveyors of fake news to exploit the platform to further their own agendas.  During the French elections, special interests organized on platforms like Discord to orchestrate social media events on Facebook and Twitter. More recently, following a November 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a false story spread across Facebook saying Antifa terrorists were the perpetrators.

At Storyful, we spent the last two years mapping and understanding the pathways that “fake news” travels. Our work makes it clear that Facebook is a well trod avenue for disseminating dubious information from private or semi-private platforms and communities to the masses. Following the tragic events in Las Vegas last year, we detailed false claims made by questionable entities on Facebook. In the UK, we highlighted the efforts of a special interest group to affect elections and advance an agenda.  And, on our podcast, we discussed the impact of social media and disinformation in India.

What happens in the following weeks and months may have very serious implications for the news industry and the world. Upcoming elections in Eastern Europe, Brazil, Pakistan, Cambodia and the United States (among others) are prime opportunities for those who seek to spread disinformation via an increasingly siloed social media population who are most likely to trust sources they agree with.

Users the world over flock to Facebook to discuss happenings big and small, local and global, factual and fictional. Left alone, these would be the very same users that would assess the value and reach of stories generated by newsrooms that endeavor every day to report facts and vital information.

We at Storyful will watch for any further developments on these changes and hope industry experts will have a seat at the table to influence the fate of news on Facebook.

[This post was originally published on Storyful’s blog]

 

Flickr/notoriousjen

Truth, Lies and Likes: The Reader’s Role in the Battle Against Fake News

By

On November 17, 2016

In How Tos

There’s been much ado in media circles this past week about the prevalence of “fake” news  on social networks and what, if any, effect that had on the outcome of the U.S. election. Stories from big players like InfoWars and The Blaze as well as cookie-cutter outlets like Occupy Democrats, WorldNetDaily, The Other 98% and US Uncut have taken off on social media, largely because they hit the right buttons with their target audiences.

The formula is simple, but brilliant. They start with an incredible headline intended to upset or delight a particular type of reader. That reader skims the story, is set off by particular triggers, then immediately shares it to their network of like-minded friends. The story spreads like a virus across the network, with little attention paid to whether or not the information is real or where it really originated. It’s classic social media strategy, greatly amplified.

Though some of the news on sites that have been called into question is undoubtedly made up whole cloth, there are many more stories that may have started with a sliver of truth, but these stories are so dubiously sourced and creatively written that they barely resemble the truth by the time they start their travels around the social web. And, sadly, a Buzzfeed investigation has found that such stories performed better on Facebook during the election cycle than stories from the leading news sources.

Many have been quick to point fingers at the social networks, Facebook in particular, for allowing fake news sites to thrive in their environments. But those who are most guilty here are the creators of these sites, their success aided by the lack of media literacy among social network users. In the past few days, Google and Facebook have announced plans to try to stop the spread of manufactured news. This is welcome, but the real work needs to be done by the users, and that includes all of us.

Since Storyful’s specialty lies in verifying and debunking content found on social media,  we hope we can help.

Granted, we are most known for working with user-created content (what is often the raw material for news) and not news generated by “professional” outfits, but the same principles we use for verifying eyewitness content can be used by anyone who consumes news.

The first thing any reader, brand, researcher or journalist should do is maintain constant vigilance.

This means to approach every story or account you read online with skepticism. That’s what we do at Storyful, and it usually serves us well in identifying a fake.

How to Find Out if the News Is Real

Note where the key information comes from

Are direct quotes attributed to someone with good reason to be familiar with a certain situation, or to know what they claim to know, such as an expert or someone with provable experience in the field? Or is the piece quoting someone of dubious “expert” credentials, or with little apparent ties to the situation being discussed?

Follow the links

Does the story reference a business/government report or cite another story on another website? If the story is based entirely on a different story, click through and read that source (if there is no link, simply Google the purported source). Keep doing that in every subsequent story until you find the original report and original sources.

You may find that the shadiest sites will reference stories on similar sites that reference stories on similar sites until you’ve made it full circle without finding an original source. I call this “aggregation inception.” Or maybe, even worse, you’ll hit a total dead end looking for that original source. This should be a major red flag.   

Who is the author?

If all of the notable information seems plucked from thin air or from the writer’s opinion, look into that writer. How do they know what they claim to know? Maybe he or she is an expert in that field, and that’s great. Or maybe they are a crackpot conspiracy theorist, or an ill-informed teen in his parents’ basement, or someone using a fake identity.

Look for a second source

What is standard good practice for the journalist should also now be for the reader. If nobody else is reporting the news, there’s a good chance it isn’t real. Sometimes this is because the site in question has a huge scoop and if that’s the case, great! You were among the first to know (though the window of exclusivity is very short nowadays). But there’s also a chance that this was made up, and that is why you aren’t finding it on any other known, legitimate site.

A few more tips on spotting fake news sites:

  • Look closely at the URL. From the appearance of the shared item on social, it may look like it is from a known source like ABC News or CNN. When you click through, the site may even look like the familiar source, but look at the URL. It may have an additional domain after the “.com” – which indicates it is likely not a real site.
  • Be wary of websites that have odd domain names and particularly non-standard domain extensions (i.e. not .com, .edu, .net, .gov, etc.). It’s much easier and cheaper for fact-factory sites to spin up a new site using domain names from other countries.
  • Look on the site’s “About Us” page for any information you can find: Who runs the site? Who owns it? You might also find this information at the bottom of the site’s pages. All legitimate news sites will have this information.
  • Check the name of the site in Wikipedia, Google and Snopes.com to see if they are known for fake stories.
  • If you spot a lot of misspellings, use of all capital letters or generally odd use of language, be suspicious that the site may not be a legitimate news source.
  • The same goes for web design. If the design is difficult to navigate, doesn’t open properly or seems to be on an amateurish site, proceed with caution. It may be a legitimate self-starting journalist or expert, or it may be a total fake.
  • Take note of the author. If the post or story doesn’t have an author’s name – or any information about the author – they may not be a legitimate news source.  

And this doesn’t just apply to sites with weird names or political pop-ups, but all forms of media. Most of the newspapers, TV news sites, magazines and online news brands out there do good work – but sometimes they don’t. Maintain constant vigilance.

Finally – one of the best ways to combat misinformation and the bias of your own filter bubbles in navigating the news is to simply ensure you are reading a range of sources, especially on the stories you find yourself saying are too good, too terrible, too amazing to be true (because they probably are). This sort of varied media diet is not only useful to identify any bias from one outlet or another, but, ideally, to give yourself a fuller picture. Different reporters are able to talk to different sources and you can get a more complete story by seeing a variety of perspectives.

In an age where news is easy to manufacture but difficult to get right, we all must demand better of our news sources and ourselves as the audience.

 

(This was originally published on Storyful’s blog)

Storyful

My next adventure: Joining Storyful’s Open Newsroom

By

On July 23, 2014

In About This Site

Looking for a job is, in a lot of ways, a lot like dating*. You meet a lot of people and you talk – a lot – about yourself, about them, about your expectations for a future together. You re-examine what worked and what didn’t about past relationships, and try to find a partner that embodies the best of those memories. It’s all about looking for a good fit. After a lot of looking and a few false starts, I think I’ve found it.

I started earlier this week as Open Newsroom Editor for Storyful – and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Storyful

If you aren’t familiar with Storyful, it is a 24/7 social media news agency that discovers, verifies and delivers user-created content to newsrooms, brands and storytellers of all sorts. Storyful built its initial business providing verified UGC and information to partners via subscription service. The Open Newsroom is a consumer-facing companion piece, operating as a public space for crowdsourced verification and publication through the likes of Google and Facebook. I’ll be continuing to grow that outward-facing aspect of Storyful and its relationships with platforms, partners and stories.

It’s a good fit, to be sure. Collaborative journalism and social media has been the bedrock of my journalism career. I been talking about crowdsourcing, social media/UGC ethics, verification and UGC best practices for several years – and I’ve done a lot of training for journalists in those fields. For me, joining Storyful is like being asked to join the Avengers- they know this stuff better than anyone.

Storyful has been one of the most prominent voices in the industry as it pertains to social media verification and ethics in using user-generated content (which, it just so happens, happen to be pet issues of mine as well). Its best practices and breaking news case studies have been part of my classroom curriculum for years. Now, I get to be more than an admirer – I get to be on the team.

I can’t wait to get started on this new bright future.

Casablanca Quote   Eds Note:  The past few months, since Thunderdome was shut down,  have been an especially tough stretch for me, both personally and professionally. Big thank-yous are in order for many people, but especially Robyn Tomlin, Jim Brady and Jennifer Preston – who have helped me out by listening to my whining, giving advice, making introductions and buying drinks as needed.  And I wouldn’t have come out the other side without my husband/crisis counselor, Ben, who has patiently dealt with my many phases of layoff grief.

 

* Or so I hear, I haven’t dated in a long time.

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