Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: research

Improving journalism by taking cues from experts in disinformation

By

On October 21, 2018

In Uncategorized

As journalists and media professionals, we don’t like to think someone is better at our job than we are, especially those who seek to undermine our work with misleading or outright made up narratives.  So when I ask journalists, “What does disinformation do better than journalism?” I expect a few raised eyebrows.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to present my forthcoming research project to a selected group of professionals in journalism, technology, education and philanthropy at the Newsgeist unconference, organized annually by Google and the Knight Foundation at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix.

Newsgeist WhiteboardOn Saturday morning, An Xiao Mina, Director of Product for Meedan and strategy lead for the Credibility Coalition, and I led a conversation with attendees examining the strengths of journalism and disinformation and what we in media should seek to learn from those strengths. We cheekily called it “Defense Against the Dark Arts,” inspired by none other than the first-year wizardry class in the Harry Potter universe, where students learn about dark magic and how to handle it.

We split the group into four small groups and challenged them to come up with examples of unique strengths of high quality journalism and the countering strengths of effective disinformation. Here is a sampling of what the group came up with.

 

Strengths of High Quality Journalism*:

  • Institutional trust
  • Experience and professional training
  • Many steps, voices and layers involved before publishing
  • Rules of ethics, code of conduct
  • Legal liability for what is published
  • Brand recognition
  • Adherence to industry norms of objectivity and fairness
  • A shared mission to inform and tell the truth
  • Transparency
  • Support and checks by editors and copyeditors
  • Audience participation
  • Empathy through a community connection
  • Complicity in community action
  • Complexity in explaining big data, trends and human stories

* We are well aware these are strengths exhibited in only the best of newsrooms. Not all publishers are created equal in this regard (but it would be cool if they were).

 

Strengths of Effective Disinformation:

  • Speed of publishing
  • Novelty and excitement of new information
  • Responsiveness to news events and reactions
  • Cooperative amplification between competitors
  • Simplification of difficult subject matter
  • Trust through a lack of affiliation and complicity with institutions
  • Liberated from legal and ethical norms
  • Playing to emotions, fears, biases and reactions
  • Recognition of altruism as a motive for publishing (i.e. shedding a light on unknown/hidden information)
  • Audience participation (i.e. share this to help spread the word)
  • Tapping into a community’s passions and beliefs
  • Allowing the audience to feel as if they are part of an investigation or exposure of truths
  • Engaging visuals
  • Drives a desire to share
  • Successful business model driven by attention economics
  • Great at targeting on Facebook and other social networks
  • Offering related content on the same topics
  • Identity validation of the reader

The bolded strengths above were those we as a group felt are aspirational to be adapted into (or improved) in legitimate journalism practice. Obviously we do not want to incorporate unethical or illegal behavior into our practice, nor do we want to engage in any of the extremes of disinformation. “Simplification of difficult subject matter” in a disinformation context might be oversimplification, and “Drives a desire to share” might be “Manipulations emotions to compel sharing.” It’s important that journalists working in good faith get the balance right.

But many of these strengths are worth of being aspirational. Some of them — like “engaging visuals” and “drives a desire to share” — are skills we are always seeking to improve to compete on a level playing field with more social media-savvy outlets. Others — like “tapping into a community’s passions and beliefs” — are strengths we used to have as news practitioners, but maybe have lost our way in some markets.

These conversations also brought about questions for further reflection in our newsrooms and communities about how we as journalists might improve and what affect those changes might have. These questions also inform my own questions as I embark on my JSK fellowship research.

How is best for news outlets to show information contextually? What effect, if any, does that have on its trustworthiness?

What is the effect of decontexualization of information on the audience?

How much does the brand of the news outlets matter (if at all)?

Does personalization of the news affect its trustworthiness to skeptical audiences?

What is the role of psychological self-preservation in building “echo chambers” for our news consumption?

 

So what do you think?

Do you agree or disagree with anything in the above strengths lists? What else would you want journalism to learn from disinformation and those who participate in it?

Feel free to comment below or start yelling at me and everyone else on the social network of your choice.

An Xiao Mina contributed to this post. Read more about this year’s Newsgeist from Mathew Ingram

Photo via Flickr/kevharb

Want to understand disinformation? Ask the people formerly known as your audience

By

On October 10, 2018

In Disinformation Study

I’ve spent the better part of my career focused on people who live in the internet. Some of them were everyday eyewitnesses who happened to share newsworthy photos or videos. Others were not so everyday – they were trolls, bots or, worse, architects and foot soldiers of disinformation campaigns.

There are many, many studies out there focused on disinformation – its creation, its proliferation via mainstream media, the psychology of online crowds pushing these narratives, the role of social networks, etc. Most study of disinformation is typically focused on the overall system.

I want to do something different in my fellowship year at Stanford. My research question for this year is:

How might news organizations fight misinformation by learning from the people who believe it and share it?

While I still care very much about disinformation,  I’m not particularly interested in giving its perpetrators more of my time. Instead, I want to better understand those at the receiving end of these campaigns – the regular people who happen to get caught up in spreading false stories – and what we in media can learn from their experiences.

I came to Stanford because of an interest in design thinking and using that approach to help solve problems within the information system. If you aren’t familiar with the design thinking approach, it is best illustrated as follows:

The design thinking process

For the next five months, I intend to focus on the first two aspects of this process, empathizing and defining.

In this study approach, I will be meeting consumers of disinformation where they are – in their homes and communities – to better understand their media habits, their motivations and the struggles they face in trying to find out what is going on in the world. My end goal is to identify common pain points and useful insights from these case studies that can be shared with local newsrooms around the country, in hopes we can work together to find paths to improve audience reach and engagement.

I have discussed this research project with many journalists. About half of those – mostly newsroom executive types – said “I already know why” and proceeded to tell me about the assumed political affiliations, intelligence level and nefarious intentions of this audience.

One newsroom executive at a large news company that covers middle America told me, “I’ll save you the time, it is because they don’t care about the truth.”

That reaction is precisely why I feel this study is important. Journalists, especially news executives, think they have all of the answers as to why a huge swath of their former audience has turned away from the news. If they actually had any of these insights, or made an effort to critically evaluate this group and ask them questions, they might find they actually didn’t know the problem in the first place (let alone the solutions). Assuming we already know all we need to know about the audience and THEY are the problem is pretty much why the journalism industry is in such dire straits.

But on to the next steps:

Right now, I am identifying six to eight broad user types (in design thinking parlance, they are called “extreme users”) within the US to help focus my study. Most people who share false news stories are not activists, trolls, politics junkies or meme creators, but those sort of users in the disinformation ecosystem are well placed to help us identify the needs of a wider population. These users will not be representative of any one group or demographic, but rather, they are case studies focused on the individual and their worldview.Photo via Flickr/kevharb

Exactly how I’ll identify my “test subjects” is still in the works, but will largely involve finding individuals who have followed particular sharing patterns on Facebook associated with one of the user types. From there, it’s on me to convince them to participate in the study. This winter, I will go into the field to meet my case study subjects face-to-face, ideally at their homes, to observe their environments and empathetically interview them to better uncover their tension points, media habits and more.

Right now, I’m learning in my d.school classes a bit more about this stage of the process. I’ve found that while I’ve spent my career in journalism, interviewing people from a design thinking approach is very different from doing so as a journalist. We have to keep questions open and without judgement, to observe more than just hear responses and to lean into discomfort and tension instead of away. We have to leave our humanity at the door, to some extent, to record real insights.

The plan right now is for me to have these interviews done by early spring so I can transcribe them, pull out insights, note surprises and identify problem areas for the users, with the hope there will be some commonality between user types. I will then compile those findings into a very basic report, along with case studies on the (not identified) users, to share with newsrooms, who are best placed to take this work into the next stages of ideation, prototyping and testing with their own audiences.  Fingers crossed I can get everything done in time.

So what do I need?

For one, I’d love to find partners and collaborators in this endeavor. If you have ideas or feedback for my potential extreme users, identifying text subjects and or best practices in the field research – let me know.

Also, I’ll eventually need some funding. I will be traveling in person to conduct this study in six to eight different locations around the US, which will involve flights, rental cars and likely a few nights in various shady roadside motels. I’ll also want to prove a small payment to my test subjects for their time, as they would expect in any other research study.

If you have feedback, questions, ideas or money you want to toss my way for this project, let me know. This is my first time ever really conducting a research study, so I have a lot to learn, and I’d love for all of you to join me for the ride.

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)

Who’s trying to save journalism this week

By

On September 24, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

Following the News 2.0 Forum a couple of weeks ago and my (awesome) vacation, it suddenly seems like everyone is talking about the “future of journalism” right now, particularly when it comes to how to fund it.

Under the familiar topic of paid online news, the Guardian reported this week on a poll that found web users prefer subscriptions to micropayments. Of course, that’s all entirely based on the premise that they’d have to be paying for news in the first place, as there was no option for “I will do what I can to not pay anything”.

Anyway, the finding isn’t entirely surprising. Most people don’t understand micropayments in the first place and, frankly, it makes sense to those who may be more familiar with print subscriptions to buy all-access for one fee than buying content one piece at a time.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Jack Shafer at Slate made the case as to why Obama should stay out of the fight to save American newspapers. The real issue at hand is a bill from Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin that would allow newspapers to reorganize themselves as non-profits.

The reasons this could be a very bad idea are many. For starters, it seeks to only help newspapers and not any other media. Two, it doesn’t actually fix the primary problem, anyway. If newspapers were to suddenly become non-profits, it wouldn’t change the fact that they lose money. And three, it seeks to preserve a status quo in an industry that needs to be anything but.

A far better solution (IMHO) gets a spotlight from David Westphal at the Online Journalism Review: Creating revenue by selling our best skills as journalists.  Talk surfaced at a recent IRE conference about the prospect of selling journalists’ research skills on a “for hire” basis. This sort of thing has been done for years by the Economist and a few operations (like GlobalPost) have begun trying it out as well.

It’s a simple idea that could really have some legs if done correctly. It would take one of the most innate and specialized skills of investigative journalists – researching and reporting – and sell it to clients who want deep background on, say, a local company, an incident or a piece of legislation.  We all know that anyone can write a story these days, but it takes a certain kind of skill set to tenaciously chase a story in the way an investigative reporter might – so why not market that?

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén & Hosted by Pressable