Global fact-checking up 50% in past year
Reporters' Lab tally for 2016 finds nearly 100 sites and organizations keeping tabs on politicians
By Mark Stencel - February 16, 2016
The high volume of political truth-twisting is driving demand for political fact-checkers around the world, with the number of fact-checking sites up 50 percent since last year.
The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual census of international fact-checking currently counts 96 active projects in 37 countries. That’s up from 64 active fact-checkers in the 2015 count. (Map and List)
A bumper crop of new fact-checkers across the Western Hemisphere helped increase the ranks of journalists and government watchdogs who verify the accuracy of public statements and track political promises. The new sites include 14 in the United States, two in Canada as well as seven additional fact-checkers in Latin America.There also were new projects in 10 other countries, from North Africa to Central Europe to East Asia.
With this dramatic growth, politicians in at least nine countries will have their statements scrutinized before their voters go to the polls for national elections this year. (In 2015, fact-checkers were on the beat for national elections in 11 countries.)
Active fact-checkers by continent in our latest tally:
Africa: 5
Asia: 7
Australia: 2
Europe: 27
North America: 47
South America: 8
More than a third of the currently active fact-checkers (33 of 96) launched in 2015 or even in the first weeks of 2016.
The Reporters’ Lab also keeps tabs on inactive fact-checking ventures, which currently number 47. Some of them assure us they are in suspended animation between election cycles — a regular pattern that keeps the fact-checking tally in continuous flux. At least a few inactive fact-checkers in the United States have been “seasonal” projects in past elections. The Reporters’ Lab regularly updates the database, so the tallies reported here are all as of Feb. 15, 2016.
Growing Competition
U.S. fact-checkers dominate the Reporters’ Lab list, with 41 active projects. Of these, three-quarters (30 of 41) are focused on the statements of candidates and government officials working at the state and local level. And 15 of those are among the local media organizations that have joined an expanding network of state affiliates of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning venture started nine years ago by the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Florida.
(Editor’s Note: PolitiFact founder Bill Adair is a Duke professor who oversees the Reporters’ Lab work. The Lab is part of the the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.)
In the past year, PolitiFact’s newspaper and local broadcast partners have launched new regional sites in six states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri and Nevada) and reactivated a dormant one in a seventh state (Ohio).
In some cases, those new fact-checkers are entering competitive markets. So far this election year, at least seven U.S. states have more than one regional fact-checker and in California there are three.
With the presidential campaign underway, competition also is increasing at the national level, where longstanding fact-checkers such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker now regularly square off with at least eight teams of journalists who are systematically scrutinizing the the candidates’ words. And with more and more newsrooms joining in, especially on debate nights, we will be adding to that list before the pixels dry on this blog post.
Competition is on the rise around the world, too. In 10 other countries, voters have more than one active fact-checker to consult.
The tally by country:
U.S.: 41
France: 5
U.K.: 4
Brazil: 3
Canada: 3
South Korea: 3
Spain: 3
Argentina: 2
Australia: 2
Tunisia: 2*
Ukraine: 2
* One organization in Tunisia maintains two sites that track political promises (a third site operated by the same group is inactive).
The growing numbers have even spawned a new global association, the International Fact-Checking Network hosted by the Poynter Institute, a media training center in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Promises, Promises
Some of the growth has come in the form of promise-tracking. Since January 2015, fact-checkers launched six sites in five countries devoted to tracking the status of pledges candidates and party leaders made in political campaigns. In Tunisia, there are two new sites dedicated to promise-tracking — one devoted to the country’s president and the other to its prime minister.
There are another 20 active fact-checkers elsewhere that track promises, either as their primary mission or as part of a broader portfolio of political verification. Added together, more than a quarter of the active fact-checkers (26 of 96, including nine in the United States) do some form of promise-tracking.
The Media Is the Mainstream — Especially in the U.S.
Nearly two-thirds of the active fact-checkers (61 of 96, or 64 percent) are directly affiliated with a new organization. However this breakdown reflects the dominant business structure in the United States, where 90 percent of fact-checkers are part of a news organization. That includes nine of 11 national projects and 28 of 30 state/local fact-checkers
Media Affiliations of 41 Active U.S. Fact-Checkers
Newspaper: 18
TV: 10
TV + Newspaper: 1
Radio: 3
Digital: 3
Student Newspaper: 1
Not Affiliated: 4
The story is different outside the United States, where less than half of the active fact-checking projects (24 of 55, or 44 percent) are affiliated with news organizations.
The other fact-checkers are typically associated with non-governmental, non-profit and activist groups focused on civic engagement, government transparency and accountability. A handful are partisan, especially in conflict zones and in countries where the lines between independent media, activists and opposition parties are often blurry and where those groups are aligned against state-controlled media or other governmental and partisan entities.
Many of the fact-checkers that are not affiliated with news organizations have journalists on their staff or partner with professional news outlets to distribute their content.
All About Ratings
More than three out of four active U.S. fact-checkers (33 of 41, or 81 percent) use rating systems, including scales that range from true to false or rating devices, such as the Washington Post’s “Pinocchios.” That pattern is consistent globally, where 76 of 96, or 79 percent, use ratings.
This report is based on research compiled in part by Reporters’ Lab student researchers Jillian Apel, Julia Donheiser and Shaker Samman. Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (and a former managing editor of the Italian fact-checking Pagella Politica) also contributed to this report, as did Reporters’ Lab director Bill Adair, Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University (and founder of PolitiFact).
Please send updates and additions to Reporters’ Lab co-director Mark Stencel (mark.stencel@duke.edu).
Trump’s Twitter Gang
By Natalie Ritchie - February 5, 2016
Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is exactly what you would expect: brash, self-confident, and over the top.
He has the most followers of any 2016 presidential candidate – 5.04 million, slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 4.79 million.
Trump’s feed is an extension of his campaign personality. Most candidates are as cautious with Twitter as they are with their speeches and websites, offering a bland stream of talking points and event promotions.
His tweets range from media criticism (“I find that @Reuters is a far more professional operation than @AP”) to shameless bashing of other candidates (“I want to do negative ads on John Kasich, but he is so irrelevant to the race that I don’t want to waste my money”).
This is hardly anything new for the business tycoon, whose Twitter use has always been a little unconventional. He tweeted for months about the relationship between actors Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, urging Pattinson to “drop her” and check out “the Miss Universe girls” instead. (He owned the Miss Universe pageant at the time.) He announced former congressman Anthony Weiner’s return to Twitter with a “pervert alert.” And he once wrote, “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”
Rumor has it – Pataki, Kasich, & Senator Lindsey Graham are dropping out of the race very soon. Hope it's not true, they're so easy to beat!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2015
Trump uses Twitter like a digital-age megaphone. His supporters – sometimes hundreds of them – retweet his messages and offer their own thoughts about his campaign. And Trump in turn retweets them.
"@BornToBeGOP: @realDonaldTrump Your family is a better watch than the Kardashians by a mile!" Cute!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2015
Who are these fans? I tracked down three of them who had been retweeted by Trump and asked why they are part of his Twitter gang.
John D’Orlando runs a manufacturing company that produces small custom parts for the semiconductor industry. A Massachusetts father of three, he joined Twitter to keep up with his son’s soccer team.
D’Orlando primarily uses Twitter to respond to others. “If somebody says something that I think is kinda crazy, I just tweet back at them,” he said. He often uses the platform to voice his dislike of Hillary Clinton (“hillary for prison 2016!”) and Jeb Bush (“jeb is done! What a loser!”)
D’Orlando says getting retweeted by Trump was actually an accident. He unintentionally left Donald Trump’s handle in a reply to someone else, and the tweet was picked up by Trump or a staff member tweeting for him. D’Orlando joked that he got in trouble with his wife after she began receiving hundreds of notifications to her Gmail account as his Trump tweet was favorited and retweeted.
"@johndorlando1: @ArizonaLuke @realDonaldTrump @JoeTrippi @FoxNews his crowds are huge…hard to think he is going to lose."
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2015
D’Orlando says in an election he is “looking for people that are self-made and not people that have grown up handed positions in government, ushered in because they were the next one in line.”
D’Orlando believes that, as a businessman, Trump is the most qualified candidate to fix the “garbage” economy.
“Do I like everything that Donald Trump says and the way he treats certain people? No,” D’Orlando said. But he thinks Trump is the country’s best shot.
“Donald Trump doesn’t know how to build a building, but he builds the best buildings in the world,” he added. “He can’t talk concrete with you, but he puts the people around him who can.”
D’Orlando believes politicians have forgotten about workers in the manufacturing sector. “Nobody is looking out for us right now,” he said, adding that he makes less at age 50 than he did at 30.
“I’m looking at what happened in the last eight or ten years and I didn’t bring kids in the world for this,” he said. “We’re divided now. The whole race thing is ridiculous.”
“I’m a white guy but I never looked at another person as any different than anybody,” he said. “I want the person operating on me to be the smartest person whether he’s Indian or black or a woman.” But D’Orlando is frustrated with “the way it sounds on the news – that white people are bad to black people.”
If D’Orlando had to choose someone else, he would choose Sen. Ted Cruz, since “nobody likes him.” He wants to vote for someone “somebody that the establishment doesn’t like.”
D’Orlando doesn’t put much stock in the current polls. “If I want to make Hillary win a poll I just have to go to a bunch of women’s colleges and poll a bunch of liberal women and she’ll win 95 to 5,” he said. “Poll somebody who works with their hands and see what they think.”
Joseph Grcar is a retired mathematician living in Castro Valley, California. He was cat-sitting and flipping through channels when he caught a live feed of one of Trump’s first rallies. He got hooked.
“I don’t think honestly you can understand the Trump phenomenon until you listen to a few of his speeches,” he said. “I’d always wondered if the show [The Apprentice] was scripted, but he talks at rallies the same way,” he said.
He contrasted Trump’s authentic, unrehearsed speaking with Senator Marco Rubio’s “amazing ability to remember these two minute speeches” during debates.
Grcar joined Twitter to support Trump and send in suggestions directly to Trump’s team. “[Twitter] seems like the simplest way to send a one liner to the Trump campaign,” he said.
https://twitter.com/jfgrcar/status/645556574497345536
https://twitter.com/jfgrcar/status/644264603837272065
Trump retweeted Grcar’s critique of Ben Carson that said, “Gentle Ben is no match for Putin or if the truth be told even for Hilary. USA needs a winner.”
The retweet “really got me going,” he laughed before admitting “I don’t think it was actually him. He has remarked that there are four or five people that retweet his stuff.”
Grcar calls himself a Reagan Democrat – he used to vote straight-ticket Democratic but switched to all-Republican when Reagan ran.
More recently, he stopped watching NBC and listening to NPR and began watching Fox News. “I can’t say if it’s more accurate, but it’s a completely different point of view,” he said.
Still, as Trump’s campaign heated up and Fox continued to focus on other candidates, he became more skeptical. “I then realized that these guys [at Fox] were the establishment Republican Party,” he said. “I got the feeling that Fox wasn’t giving me the whole story.”
Grcar said Trump has changed his attitude towards the Republican Party as a whole. “I always thought George Bush was a great president but now I don’t,” he said. “How could he have been protecting us when there were all these warnings beforehand? And then he engaged in this stupid war in Iraq that had nothing to do with Afghanistan.”
https://twitter.com/jfgrcar/status/656252397883228161
https://twitter.com/jfgrcar/status/656346495784873984
In July, Trump was sharply criticized for his harsh comments about Sen. John McCain’s war record. Trump said, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s comments struck a chord with Grcar. “I always wondered about that,” Grcar said, adding that McCain is “not exactly a hero. A hero is the guy who storms the bridge and singlehandedly takes out the machine gun, not someone dropping bombs on the poor hapless Vietnamese.”
“Once he got into Congress he didn’t do anything for the vets,” Grcar added.
Despite Trump’s provocative comments early on in the campaign, Grcar thinks Trump has become “more guarded” in the time since. He added, “His speeches aren’t as much fun as they were originally.”
Jack Dixon, 63, ran a melon farm in Arizona for years before he got sick and retired. During that time, he said, he employed thousands of migrant workers.
He believes Trump’s immigration plan is “absolutely perfect.” Dixon called the current H-2A guestworker program a “disaster” and wants immigrants to receive more legal work visas. Trump’s current proposal includes no provisions for immigrant work visas or H-2A reform.
Dixon was a Republican for 35 years but recently became a registered Independent. Although he has followed politics since he was young, this is the first campaign in which he has been vocally involved.
“I’ve lived in this world a long time, and for the last 50 years of my life I’ve seen this country decline,” he said.
Dixon is an active Twitter user, describing it as a great tool for “separating the mainstream media from the opinion of the public.”
https://twitter.com/JackDix03868724/status/622497258345398272
His account launched June 12, four days before Trump announced his candidacy, and nearly all of his tweets are devoted to supporting the business mogul.
Many of the tweets, including the one Trump retweeted, feature unsourced polling data Dixon later said he collected himself. “I know a lot of people,” he said. “That polling is as honest as a lot of the news media I believe today.”
https://twitter.com/JackDix03868724/status/660458527685632000
Several of his tweets feature vulgar remarks aimed at female Twitter users. Dixon said he has the “greatest respect in the world for women” but “political correctness has gotten out of hand.”
Dixon also frequently critiques Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly. Dixon explained, “I think Fox News set Megyn Kelly up to really take a shot at Trump, and it kind of backfired on her.”
https://twitter.com/JackDix03868724/status/661906686962102272
Dixon is especially concerned about the media’s treatment of Trump and bias towards other candidates. “We can’t let TVs pick our candidates anymore,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s about honesty,” Dixon concluded. “Corruption has absolutely destroyed this nation. I believe Mr. Trump is an honest man and he would help clean some of that up.”
Asked about Trump’s frequent factual errors, he replied, “There’s a difference between a lie and an honest mistake,” he said. “No one is going to know everything.”
Reporters’ Lab launches campaign ad project for fact-checkers
We're using the new Political TV Ad Archive to analyze campaign commercials for fact-checkers
By Alex Griffith - January 25, 2016
To help fact-checkers in the United States sift through the avalanche of campaign ads, the Reporters’ Lab will be compiling factual claims from the Political TV Ad Archive, a new database created by the Internet Archive.
Reporters’ Lab student researchers will watch the political commercials, transcribe them, and distill them into factual claims. The students will then put them in a database that can be accessed by fact-checkers from around the U.S.
The Ad Archive is compiling thousands of political ads that are airing around the country. The database includes ads from candidates, super PACs and other political groups.
The archive includes metadata on the target of the ad and the location and dates the ad aired. The ads are being collected from 20 key markets in eight early primary states.
The Reporters’ Lab database is intended to help U.S. fact-checkers, said Lab director Bill Adair.
“Our goal is to use Duke students to do the time-consuming work of watching ads and identifying the claims,” Adair said. “That should free the fact-checkers to spend more time doing research and writing their articles.”
Reporters’ Lab, IFCN to host conference about automated fact-checking
The March 31-April 1 conference will showcase new research to use computational power to help fact-checkers.
By Bill Adair - January 21, 2016
The Reporters’ Lab and Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network will host “Tech & Check”, the first conference to explore the promise and challenges of automated fact-checking.
Tech & Check, to be held March 31-April 1 at Duke University, will bring together experts from academia, journalism and the tech industry. The conference will include:
- Demos and presentations of current research that automates fact-checking
- Discussions about the institutional challenges of expanding the automated work
- Discussions on new areas for exploration, such as live fact-checking and automated annotation.
Research in computational fact-checking has been underway for several years, but has picked up momentum with a flurry of new projects.
While automating fact-checking entirely is still the stuff of science fiction, parts of the fact-checking process such as gathering fact-checkable claims or matching them with articles already published seem ripe for automation. As natural language processing (NLP) and other artificial intelligence tools become more sophisticated, the potential applications for fact-checking will increase.
Indeed, around the world several projects are exploring ways to make fact-checking faster and smarter through the use of technology. For example, at Duke University, an NSF-funded project uses computational power to help fact-checkers verify common claims about the voting records of members of Congress. The University of Texas-Arlington has developed a tool called ClaimBuster that can analyze long transcripts of debates and suggest sentences that could be fact-checked. At Indiana University, researchers have experimented with a tool that uses Wikipedia and knowledge networks to verify simple statements. Fact-checkers in France, Argentina, the U.K. and Italy are also doing work in this field.
The conference is made possible with support by, among others, the Park Foundation. More details will be published in the coming weeks.
Researchers and journalists interested in attending the conference should contact the International Fact-Checking Network at factchecknet@poynter.org
Our share of ‘the take’ on brokered conventions
Headlines speculating about a floor fight when Republicans gather in Ohio next summer showcase the art of media insta-analysis.
By Mark Stencel - December 11, 2015
One of my favorite quadrennial election traditions — other than the once-every-four-years chance to use words like “quadrennial” — is media speculation about brokered conventions. Typically this dribbles out slowly over the course of a long, contentious primary season. But there are moments when it just spwats like a big glob of ketchup from a nearly empty bottle.
News that Republican party leaders have discussed the possibility of a brokered convention produced a giant ketchup glob in the past 24 hours, offering a helpful guide to the art of the take. The take is when a large media gaggle simultaneously pounces on a news peg, producing a pile of instant analysis that usually reveals less about the subject of observation than the slant of the observers.
Some illustrations from the current feed…
The traditional conservative media establishment take:
“Krauthammer’s Take: Brokered Convention Won’t Happen Because Trump Won’t Win” (The Corner from National Review)
The traditional liberal media establishment take:
“The GOP may have a brokered convention and it’s going to be great.” (New Republic’s The Minute)
The explain-what-everyone-is-really-talking-about media take:
“What If Republicans Can’t Pick A Nominee Before Their Convention?” (FiveThirtyEight)
The New York man-on-the-street, tabloid take:
“Fearful GOP bigs brainstorm Trump alternatives” (New York Post)
The New York man-above-the-street and Washington-is-beneath-us take:
“The Republican Race Keeps Getting Weirder” (New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer)
The local take:
“Hey Cleveland, here’s what you should know about the prospect of a brokered Republican convention” (Cleveland.com)
The Democrat just-helping-my-Republican-friends take:
“Trump Can Be Stopped: Here’s How” (former DNC executive director Mark Siegel for Huffington Post)
The it’s-all-there, plug-my-new-book take:
“The Secret Plan To Nominate Mitt Romney From The Convention Floor” (BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins)
The jaded/grizzled “Political reporters have been yearning for a brokered convention for as long as I’ve been alive” take:
“If this news fills you with glee, it doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person…” (Washington Post Plum Line’s Happy Hour Roundup)
The jaded/grizzled, meta-media take:
Oh, wait…. You’re reading it.
What’s your plan for the Oakville Acorn?
For the final paper in my freshman seminar, students must describe their plans for the Oakville Acorn.
By Bill Adair - December 2, 2015
This is the prompt for the final paper in my PJMS 89S freshman seminar on the Digital Revolution and the Future of News. Students each need to write a 10-page paper and submit it by Dec. 12.
Congratulations! You’ve inherited a newspaper!
Your Uncle Bob, who had been publisher of the Oakville Acorn until he died in a tragic printing press accident, left the paper to you! In his will, Uncle Bob said he was giving it to you because he thought you had the right mix of journalistic skills and business savvy to keep the paper alive.
The Acorn is the only remaining daily paper in greater Oakville, a metropolitan area with 1.5 million people. It’s facing the same challenge as other papers – a sharp drop in ad revenue and declining readership as older customers die off.
It’s a well-respected paper that has won three Pulitzer Prizes (including the 2014 criticism prize for its restaurant reviews).
It is known for great investigative reporting and its in-depth local news. Oakville’s mayor is serving a 10-year sentence for accepting bribes that were uncovered by the Acorn’s investigative team.
Oakville is a growing area. It is the state capital and home of the largest university, Oakville State, which has a nationally ranked football team and rabid fans who travel hundreds of miles to watch the the Antlers play. The Acorn offers great coverage of the Antlers with special sections printed for every home game.
But the Acorn is facing many challenges. Its circulation has declined from a high of 300,000 in 2005 to just 120,000 today. That’s especially painful because Uncle Bob is still burdened with $5 million in debt to pay off the Goss Metroliner presses that he bought when the industry was strong. (Even sadder: he died when he fell into one of them.)
Classified ads are gone from the paper and revenue from display ads has declined 40 percent since 2000. To keep the paper afloat, Bob has been selling off the Acorn’s assets, including its downtown headquarters. The Acorn will be moving to a suburban office park on the edge of town that’s about a mile from the paper’s printing plant. A local developer plans to renovate the downtown building and turn it into a center for high-tech companies. The newsroom will become a food court.
For all of its success with accountability journalism, the Acorn has done little on the Web and in mobile. The paper is still using a 10-year-old CMS that was built to accommodate an early co-publishing deal with AOL. (“AOL” was an online service that introduced most Americans to “the Internet.”) The Acorn website offers no original content, just the same stories that are found in the print edition. Bob liked to hold them back until 6 a.m.
The paper is overstaffed. It has 200 newsroom employees, including many older staffers who are unfamiliar with Twitter and Facebook. One columnist recently wrote a column boasting about how he does not use Facebook.
It’s been several months since Uncle Bob died and you’re over the grief. You now have to figure out how to carry on his legacy and invigorate the Acorn. (Selling the paper is not an option. Uncle Bob’s will stipulates that you must operate the paper as a news organization or you will forfeit the other things you inherited — Uncle Bob’s sprawling Oakville estate, his 40-foot yacht Ink by the Barrel and his 2-bedroom timeshare in Orlando.)
So what’s your plan? How can you build on the strengths of the Acorn and the Oakville area? Write a 10-page paper about your plans to reinvent the Acorn and return it to profitability. Include your business plan and a detailed editorial strategy. Feel free to use sketches of your plans and samples of your journalism.
Make Uncle Bob proud.
Will the obituary outlive the death of print?
Technology has changed the way people write and share news about loved ones.
By Jillian Apel - November 24, 2015
More than 2,000 years have passed since the first death notices were carved into the stone and metal newspapers of ancient Rome, recording “daily events” (or Acta Diurnas) for their readers. The art of writing about death has changed and improved immensely over the centuries, but the tradition is still catching up to the modern digital age — and so are people’s expectations.
Ask anyone you know what they think their obituary will be like. When I did this with a group of 20-year-old, iPhone-touting Duke students, they all answered with a variation of “long and written well, in the newspaper of my hometown.” How many of these millennials have actually picked up a physical newspaper in the past month? Why then would they assume an obituary belongs to the print world when almost everything else they read has gone online?
Well, it won’t be for long. Legacy.com, an online obituary publisher founded in 1998, has partnered with over 1,500 newspapers across the world so far in an effort to usher the obituary from the printed page to the Internet. Along with a handful of smaller competitors, such as Tributes.com, Legacy aims to centralize, modernize and ultimately revolutionize the way obituaries are written read and stored for history.
“Legacy.com has made it possible for all the obituaries on our platform to be easily searched, read and shared online from any device, so today obituaries have a much larger audience than when they were limited to print,” said Kim Evenson, Legacy’s chief marketing officer. “When something is written with the expectation of sharing with a larger audience, I think it opens up the possibilities.”
In this digital age, when Facebook pages dedicated to the deceased are sprawling with comments, pictures and direct discussion with the dead (“Hi, Uncle Joe, we miss you”), online obituary companies have started to mirror this forum-type format. Legacy, for example, allows closely moderated comments and contains an online store for mourners to send sympathy baskets or flowers to the grieving family.
Related Link: A million ways to die online
“The family has so much that they are responsible for in a short window,” Evenson said in an email interview. “…By providing a Guest Book, flowers and other services, we let the people who are further from the death help and support the family, especially when they are unable to pay respects in person.”
Social media and online services are also changing how professional obituary writers do their work. These digital channels help reporters do more in-depth research and find extra features they can link to that give a fuller picture of the deceased.
“For writing obits, being online means I can move beyond words,” said Jade Walker, a longtime obituary writer and author of the Blog of Death. “I’m still able to tell a great story,” she wrote in an email interview, “but now I can also feature photos, slideshows, artwork, podcasts, videos, tweets, Instagram and Facebook embeds, timelines and message boards.”
‘Why pay for obituary writers…’
With the loss of print subscriptions and advertisements over the past two decades, obituaries have followed comics, movie listings and other newspaper mainstays onto the Web. And in many newspapers these days, those obituaries are increasingly in the form of paid announcements written by family and even by the deceased themselves — not staff obit writers.
“Why pay for obituary writers to cover the community when the grieving families can be charged by the column inch?” asked Walker, who is currently the overnight editor of the Huffington Post. “Legacy simply had the vision to respond to these changes, and acted on them by providing a digital platform for newspapers to publish family-written obits.”
Multiple studies in the journalism world have analyzed these changes in the obit business. In a 2009 paper, University of Georgia journalism professor Janice Hume discussed the growing popularity of online guest books, like those at Legacy, as a place of community and communication — both with the deceased and with each other.
“Remarkably for content sponsored by a traditional news organization, many guest books included messages to the dead,” Hume discovered. “They ranged from expressions of love and gratitude to specific instructions for the deceased. Often they were simple, repeated over and over and for many different people. ‘You will never be forgotten,’ ‘God bless you,’ and ‘We will meet again.'”
Another trend shaking the obit business is the shift to families directly posting messages about their loved ones on their blogs, Facebook pages and other online outlets — a kind of informal bereavement that gives friends, coworkers and childhood friends a chance to add to the story of the dead.
“This provides a much richer portrait of the deceased — a portrait not possible with the typical length and professional constraints of traditional newspaper obituaries,” Hume found. “…Perhaps more important, it provides a public forum for the bereaved.”
The increasing informality of online obituaries has not only affected how a community deals with grief, but has also changed how obituaries are written. The increase in self-written and amateur obituaries has resulted in more euphemisms, humor and personal anecdotes than are common in professionally written obits.
Euphemisms for dying, which I studied for a separate article, were first used by early obit writers in England who wanted to avoid the grisly details of death. American journalists in the 20th century generally moved away from the use of euphemisms, deciding instead that “to die” was the most clear and accurate way to share the news. The word play of euphemisms has come full circle, however, as many paid or family-written obituaries have started using phrases such as “passed away,” “went home” and “departed this life” to describe a loved one’s death.
While this language is becoming more and more common, most of the newspapers that have partnered with Legacy.com still follow the general formal constraints of obituary writing. Hume noted that the transition from print to online is still not complete because of the continued use of journalistic style.
“Products of a formalized editing process, [obits] report facts, and use conventional language — noting, for example, a ‘funeral’ rather than a ‘homecoming’ service, and including a specific cause of death.”
The growth of online obituaries is a natural way for the story form to keep up in the 21st century. But there’s also a risk that these services will come across to some readers and mourners as a scam that makes money from people’s loss and grief.
When I asked Evenson about these kinds of criticisms, she passionately described Legacy.com as a caring, thoughtful and technologically advanced company.
“The company is fiscally responsible so that we can deliver on our promise to be the place where life stories live on,” she said. “We are entrusted with a moment in time where we realize that material things don’t matter… that it’s the love that connects us and lives on. That’s an awesome responsibility, guarding those memories and keeping them for future generations.”
Jillian Apel is a student researcher at the Duke Reporters’ Lab.
A million ways to die online, at least in the language of obits
Paid and digital death notices offer other ways to talk about 'departing this earthly life.'
By Jillian Apel - November 24, 2015
Death is truly inevitable. It’s one thing that links us all as humans. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for most people to talk about.
That taboo is reflected on the pages of newspapers and websites that increasingly rely on funeral homes, survivors and sometimes even the deceased themselves to write the death notices — a style of writing that was once the earthly domain of professional obit writers. before digital technology began to change how we share news about death.
RELATED LINK: Will the obit outlive the death of print?
Journalists can be pretty blunt. The Associated Press Stylebook, for instance, tells journalists to stick to words like “death” or “die.” “Don’t use euphemisms like passed on or passed away except in a direct quote,” AP instructs its writers. And many big-city newspapers that still have professional obit writers on staff use that kind of wording. But paid death notices written by funeral homes and family, on the other hand, are much more likely to use more mild, indirect language to avoid sounding harsh.
After doing a little research, I found these kinds of carefully worded references to death were increasingly common in newspapers and online sites that now depend on these kinds of write-ups instead of ones written by professional journalists. The list below was drawn from obituaries that ran in local newspapers in North Carolina and California over several weeks.
The wording I found fell into three categories.
Polite Euphemisms: These references are generally ways to avoid using The Verb That Must Not Be Used — the exact opposite of the more blunt AP style. Examples I saw:
- Passed
- Passed away
- Passed away peacefully
The Transcendent Experience: People often use religious or spiritual language in death notices to reflect their views on what death truly means — and what lies beyond. Examples:
- Was welcomed into his home in Heaven
- Went home to be with Jesus/The Lord
- Went to be with her/his Lord and Savior
- Entered into eternal rest
- Departed this earthly life
- Passed away from this earthly life to be with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ
- Departed this life
- Earned his way into heaven
- Entered his eternal home in heaven
More to the Story: These are often examples of what an article on Legacy.com described as “a secret code, a shorthand to mask causes of death that survivors found embarrassing” — such as an overdose or a suicide. But, as the article noted, some survivors actively resist using such language, often in hope that a loved one’s death can be helpful to other families dealing with similar issues. Examples:
- Died suddenly
- Passed unexpectedly
- Slept away
Regardless of what the AP Stylebook says, there is no right or wrong with obituaries. Journalists have to follow the rules for the sake of consistency and accuracy, but for families and funeral homes, the page is their canvas. Confronting the death is an important part of the grieving process — but for many loved ones, that acceptance comes long after an obituary is published.
It makes sense then that so many smaller newspapers choose protecting the family over journalistic style. As a writer, I can marvel at just how elaborate and occasionally eccentric these euphemisms can get. Although, when I shake off the writer’s bias, I know that if one of my loved ones died, I would use every word in the dictionary to avoid “death.”
Jillian Apel is a student researcher at the Duke Reporters’ Lab.
Elevator pitches for the Digital Revolution and the Future of News
The winning journalism projects covered everything from lobbying to transparency in Missouri.
By Bill Adair - November 9, 2015
Students in my freshman seminar, the Digital Revolution and the Future of News, had to come up with an idea for a new media venture and make an elevator pitch – in an elevator.
Here are the top five projects chosen by the judges (Ryan Hoerger, Leslie Winner of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and me).
The students will now develop the five ideas into prototypes and will then make presentations about them to the class as if they were pitching to a venture capitalist.
SciCheck puts political claims under a microscope
FactCheck.org's new channel gets funding for an election that is already testing the bounds of scientific reality.
By Julia Donheiser - November 2, 2015
Developmental psychologists say that most nine-month-olds are just learning how to roll over and utter familiar sounds.* But nine months in, the SciCheck fact-checking channel is standing upright and — to the delight of its proud parents — loudly challenging the politicians it catches toying with science.
SciCheck is part of FactCheck.org, a 12-year-old journalism project run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The new science-oriented feature launched in January to expose “false and misleading scientific claims.” With a new Congress and a competitive presidential campaign, there’s been no shortage of material — from the impact of medical marijuana and genomic research to the environmental consequences of volcanoes and barbeques.
The initial funding for SciCheck came in the form of a $102,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation, a philanthropic organization created in the name of longtime CBS president Frank Stanton and his wife. Now, as part of a new $150,000 grant, the foundation will keep SciCheck in business through the upcoming election year.
Annenberg Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson has said she got the idea for SciCheck during the early stages of the 2012 presidential race, after hearing Republican candidate Michele Bachmann make false claims about the HPV vaccine. Four years later, when Republicans Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina suggested that vaccines pose unproven dangers, SciCheck was there to call them out.
The science section’s sole fact-checker is Dave Levitan. He was a freelance writer for nearly ten years after earning a masters in journalism from New York University, where he also received a certificate in science, health and environmental reporting. SciCheck is Levitan’s first job as a staff member. “The biggest transition was just going into an office everyday,” he said. “I’d been used to working from home.”
While other big-time national fact-checkers — such as PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — occasionally check scientific claims, Factcheck.org has “a dedicated area of a site and a dedicated person” to focus on those topics, Levitan explained. “I don’t cover much besides science.”
SciCheck closely follows the usual FactCheck.org format for challenging a politicians’ statement. Unlike the fact-checkers that examine both true and false claims, SciCheck only reviews statements it suspects are false or misleading.
Levitan translates scientific studies and evidence into more accessible terms to confute the politicians — a process that can send their spokespeople and spin doctors toggling from Politico to Scientific American.
Scientific topics can draw in a different kind of reader than a typical political fact-check. “It may be a different, specific group that’s interested in science, but SciCheck really is just part of the site, focused on scientific topics,” Levitan said. “I write a little bit differently than someone writing about jobs or immigration, but that’s just the nature of the topic, not necessarily a focus on the audience.”
Despite SciCheck’s nonpartisan status, a majority of its fact-checks have been about Republican claims. Of the 35 stories published so far, only five focused on Democrats’ false or misleading statements, while 25 concentrated on Republicans’. (The remaining posts included a fact-check that covered statements from both parties and video recaps of previous stories).
Levitan’s boss and FactCheck.org’s director, Eugene Kiely, said he is not concerned about the disparity. “Generally speaking, we don’t keep score,” Kiely said. “Our job is to give voters the facts and counter partisan misinformation. We apply the exact same standards of accuracy to claims made by each side, and let the chips fall where they may.”
Levitan attributed the disparity to the Republican presidential candidates’ domination of media coverage. “I think a big part of it is that there are more Republican candidates, so they do a lot of campaign events,” he noted. That means “there are just more opportunities” to get things wrong.
“We are nonpartisan and will cover absolutely anything either party says,” Levitan said. “So if they get science wrong, I’ll cover it.”
Twelve SciCheck stories to date focused specifically on climate change — nine on Republicans’ claims and three on Democrats’. On that issue, Levitan said, “It does seem like there’s more skepticism among politicians than there is even among their constituents.”
The truth is, climate change — like many scientific questions SciCheck covers — is a partisan issue. A 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 71 percent of Americans who lean Democratic believe global warming is due to human activity, compared to 27 percent of those who lean Republicans.
For fact-checkers, separating the science from the politics and putting claims in context is important. “Sometimes what we write about isn’t necessarily that you got a number wrong but is that you’re spinning a given fact to fit your narrative,” Levitan said.
To broaden its audience, FactCheck.org is seeking new distribution outlets for SciCheck’s works, with stories already picked up by Discover Magazine, EcoWatch.org and the Consortium of Social Science Associations. “I expect that we will expand that further during the 2016 presidential campaign, since we typically get more traffic and attention in presidential years,” said FactCheck.org’s Kiely.
Answers in science aren’t always clear cut. But with SciCheck coming of age this election cycle, voters may have a better guide to help them sort science fact from science fiction.
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