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Using artificial intelligence to expand fact-checking

Published September 16, 2019 by Andrew Donohue

As news organizations adapt to the digital age, they’re turning to artificial intelligence to help human journalists produce the content consumers need. This is especially true in fact-checking.

Because politicians often repeat claims – even after they have been debunked – AI can help hold the politicians accountable by quickly finding relevant fact-checks. This technology can also search through vast amounts of content for fact-checkable claims, saving journalists time. 

“Fact-checking is uniquely suited to the use of AI,” said Bill Adair, director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. 

The Reporters’ Lab uses AI to build tools like Squash, a system under development that fact-checks video of politicians as they speak. The goal is to display related fact-checks on viewers’ screens in a matter of seconds.

Squash listens to what politicians say and transcribes their words, making them searchable text. It then compares that text to previously published fact-checks to look for matches. 

 “We’ve made some huge advancements in the past three years,” Adair said. “Squash has improved in accuracy since we demo’ed it at the State of the Union back in February.”

A screenshot of Squash, a fully automated fact-checking tool under development at The Reporters' Lab.
A screenshot of Squash, a fully automated fact-checking tool under development at The Reporters’ Lab.

This fall, the Squash team is refining its claim-matching technology. Its performance is inconsistent because people can make similar claims using different language.

Reporters’ Lab researchers hope to use more advanced machine learning techniques to help Squash become smarter at recognizing similar meaning even when the words don’t match. That will take time.

 “We’re dependent on technological processes improving,” Adair said. “Voice-to-text and matching algorithms are two big things we’re reliant on and those are continually improving, but still have a long way to go.” 

The Reporters’ Lab is also running user experience testing with Squash this fall to learn more about the most effective ways to display fact-checks on screens. Media researcher Jessica Mahone recently joined the lab to help develop a more effective user experience.   

 Squash could be the first step to a future where instant fact-checking is broadly available on broadcast TV, cable news and even web browsers, all thanks to the power of AI. Eventually viewers of all live political speeches and debates could benefit from Squash.

All of this is part of a larger movement within journalism starting to take advantage of AI’s possibilities. Outlets such as the Associated Press publish stories about sports and earning reports entirely written by computers. Xinhua, the Chinese’ state news agency, is experimenting with producing news broadcasts with virtual news anchors.

The Reporters’ Lab is one of the leading organizations in the world applying AI to fact-checking,  along with outlets FullFact in England and Chequeado in Argentina. The Lab’s Tech & Check Alerts, for instance, use AI to find and share checkable claims for fact-checking journalists around the country, so they do not have to spend time looking themselves. The Alerts have often shared claims that journalists have fact-checked.

It works like this: bots developed by Duke student researchers scrape Twitter posts and CNN transcripts daily to start the hunt for checkable claims. That content is fed to the ClaimBuster algorithm developed at the University of Texas, Arlington, which identifies potentially promising claims for fact-checkers. 

“Reading transcripts and watching TV looking for factual claims takes humans hours, but ClaimBuster can do it in seconds,” Adair said.

The Reporters’ Lab just last week debuted a new alert, The Best of the Bot, intended to flag the best of what the bots dig up. 

“We needed Best of the Bot because our Alerts had become so successful in finding claims that fact-checkers didn’t even have time to read them,” Adair said. “I think of it as a back-to-the-future approach. We now need a human to read the great work of the bot.”

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Bloomberg editor discusses Greek life at Duke, new book on the hazards of fraternitiesJohn Hechinger

Bloomberg editor discusses Greek life at Duke, new book on the hazards of fraternities

Published January 25, 2018 by Riley Griffin

“Insurance companies have rated fraternities just above toxic waste.”

John Hechinger, a senior editor at Bloomberg News, addressed a room of Greek-affiliated and unaffiliated Duke undergraduates on Jan. 23, devoting a portion of his lecture to the issue of liability insurance within fraternities.

“You should know this,” he said solemnly. “Students are taking the liability on themselves. You’re likely to be named if someone dies.”

John Hechinger
John Hechinger (left) and Duke professor John Burness discuss Hechinger’s book, “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities.” Photo by Bill Adair.

In September 2017, Hechinger published True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities, an exposé of American fraternity life. The book offers a deep dive on Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a historically white fraternity that has made headlines for sexual assault, racism and alcohol-induced deaths during hazing.

“There had never been an African-American member of SAE, and I wanted to explore that,” Hechinger said during a discussion provocatively titled, “Can Fraternities Be Saved? Can They Save Themselves?”

“Turns out at the University of Alabama, there are a whole bunch of fraternities… none of them have ever had African-American members,” he continued.

Hechinger said the lack of diversity that exists among historically white fraternities can be seen on Duke’s own campus.

“It’s an extreme example of what the Duke Chronicle is now writing about,” he said, referencing a Jan. 19 article that examined socioeconomic and geographic diversity within Duke fraternities and sororities.

But Hechinger said Duke’s Greek system is still very different from those at other universities. He identified Duke’s efforts to delay rush until the spring semester of each school year and bolster non-Greek social organizations, such as Selected Living Groups, as successful ways to create a safer campus environment.

“I think Duke does a lot of things right,” he said.

One student asked Hechinger how Duke administrators could be more transparent about fraternities. “It takes exposure to force an organization to change,” he responded. “I’d like to see all the reports of sexual assault disclosed and mapped so you can see where they happen… and know the demographics, too.”

Although national fraternities have been thrust into the limelight over scandal and death, Hechinger said fraternities are more popular than ever.

True Gentlemen“They are popular for a reason,” Hechinger said. “People really find value in them. Research shows that people who belong to fraternities believe they’ve had a better college experience and have a better sense of well-being.”

Hechinger also said fraternities provide members with powerful networks upon graduation.

Fraternity men tend to earn higher salaries after college than non-fraternity men with higher GPAs, according to Bloomberg News. They also dominate business and politics. Fraternity members make up about 76 percent of U.S. senators, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices and 85 percent of Fortune 500 executives, according to The Atlantic.

“That’s a testament to the power of networking,” Hechinger said.

For this reason, universities and fraternities have a tenuous relationship. “They infuriate, yet need, each other,” Hechinger writes in his book. “College administrators who try to crack down on fraternity misbehavior often find themselves confronting an influential, well-financed and politically connected adversary.”

Hechinger concluded his lecture by advocating for institutional change.

“If fraternities grapple with these issues, particularly the diversity issue, I think they do have a future,” he said. “I hope they focus more on values of brotherhood.”

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Web Annotation presents a new way to break down the news

Published December 1, 2017 by Mark Stencel

When NPR used a new web annotation tool to live-annotate and fact-check the first presidential debate in 2016, the site brought in record traffic, with 7,413,000 pageviews from 6,011,000 users; 22 percent of visitors stayed all the way to the end, something worth noting in an era when quick, shareable information dominates the news.

“We think that people were coming for the transcript and then getting the annotation, which we were fine with,” joked David Eads during an interview with the Duke Reporters’ Lab. Eads was part of the NPR visuals team throughout the annotation project, and now works as a news applications developer at ProPublica Illinois. He held that skimming through long documents and transcripts, as opposed to reading excerpts or summaries of what people said, is the new way that people like to get their news and information online, hence why NPR’s monster of a debate transcript was so popular.

Whether or not that’s true, the success that some new web annotation tools have recently had when used by major newspaper companies is something to which we should pay attention. NPR’s live transcript was one example. Another is Genius, which started out as a website called Rap Genius that allows users to annotate the lyrics to rap songs, and has since expanded to include an annotation tool that’s being utilized consistently by The Washington Post. Every speech, statement or debate transcript published in an article on the Post gets annotated by a handful of journalists via the Genius sidebar, and this has clearly been working. According to Poynter, “engaged time on posts annotated using Genius are generally between three and four times better than a normal article.”

It makes sense that consumers would want to read original statements and primary sources, given current skepticism of the media and allegations being thrown around by politicians and social media bots. Web annotation provides journalists with a tool that allows them to be present while readers go through these documents, not to push an agenda or argument, but to provide expert context, analysis and background for their audience.

Web annotation may be limited in what it allows journalists to actually do; The Washington Post mostly only uses it to make it easier for journalists to comment on speeches and statements. But other organizations have gotten creative with their own annotation tools, like The New York Times, which annotated the U.S. Constitution, and FiveThirtyEight, which wrote annotated “Perfect Presidential Stump Speeches” for both Republicans and Democrats. And many of them, including Vox and The Atlantic, are utilizing web annotation in different styles and formats for the same purpose as The Washington Post: a tool their journalists can use to break down speeches and debate transcripts into something more digestible, whole, and transparent for readers.

The first few attempts at all-powerful web annotation programs similar to Genius were epic failures. Third Voice was a browser plug-in created by a team of Singaporean engineers in 1998 that allowed users to annotate anything on any website. hough it showed promise in fostering intellectual conversation on tense topics online, it couldn’t shake its reputation of being a destructive method of Internet graffiti. A few years later in 2009, Google came up with Google Sidewiki that essentially did the same thing and encountered similar problems, as well as complications with advertisements and user communities. It lasted two years.

It’s no surprise that when you give the greater online community proverbial markers with which to annotate the entire internet, things go badly. It essentially becomes another YouTube comment section in which people can say and do whatever they want — except they can do it directly on top of a paragraph in a news article, which horrified many website owners.

But when the power to annotate is given to an expert (such as David Victor, co-chair of the Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate and global policy professor at the University of California San Diego), in a specific setting (such as Trump’s Paris Climate Agreement speech, posted on Vox), the resulting article is an archive of knowledge and information that allows readers to know not only exactly what was said, but also what it really meant and why it matters.  

An old example of annotation that I did find interesting to look back on was the first-ever instance of something being annotated: Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice. Gardner was apparently frustrated by how much of Lewis Carroll’s clever genius was being missed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as many of the witty jokes Carroll made were strict references to Oxford and to the Liddell family (whose daughter Alice inspired the novel). In the introduction of The Annotated Alice, Gardner remarks that “in the case of Alice we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century, and we need to know a great many things that are not a part of the text if we wish to capture its full wit and flavor.”

If you ask me, “a curious, complicated kind of nonsense” also sounds like an appropriate way to describe most of today’s political discourse. American citizens don’t know how to tell what is true and what is false, what is being exaggerated or made up, and what agendas these claims are trying to serve. And with social media setting such a complicated, manipulated stage for information to spread, it’s becoming increasingly harder to objectively assess the news.

Web annotation isn’t the answer to all of these problems, but it’s a nice way to start breaking down the primary sources, original statements and speech and debate transcripts. When used carefully, as NPR and The Washington Post have proved is possible, it allows journalists to present information in a transparent, natural way. The role of a journalist is, after all, to present complicated, sometimes nonsensical happenings in a way that an audience can understand, and if there’s a way to make that education easier and more entertaining, it should be welcomed.

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Tech & Check Lab Notes No. 1

Published September 25, 2017 by Bill Adair

This is the first of our updates on the Duke Tech & Check projects. We’ve divided them into two groups: the Pop-Up Family, which will include the apps that provide instant fact-checking to the public; and the ClaimBuster Family, the tools that will help fact-checkers find claims to check.

Pop-Up Family: Our first project is a manual app for iOS that will allow fact-checkers to push alerts during live events. They’ll use our CMS to push links to previous fact-checks or short messages about factual claims.

Chris has made good progress building the app and we’ve hired Registered Creative to do the design and UX work. Our goal is to have it ready for the State of the Union address on Jan. 30. We’re on track to make that deadline.

We’ll take the lessons we learn from the manual app and apply them to the automated apps we plan to build for TV, iOS and other platforms.

ClaimBuster Family: We’re using Chengkai’s ClaimBuster API to develop tools that can automatically find factual claims in transcripts. We’re identifying the most promising claims to check and will then email them to The Washington Post, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and other fact-checkers.

Lucas and Asa have nearly finished their first project, which scrapes cable news transcripts, submits the sentences to be scored by the ClaimBuster API and then ranks them by score. They’ve written a script that will email the top factual claims to fact-checkers every morning.

They have been working to optimize the output for fact-checkers, including reducing the number of news reports in the sentences that are included. They hope to start sending test emails to the fact-checkers in a couple of weeks. They then will turn to working with other partners in the Tech & Check Cooperative to begin adding other sources of political claims to these daily alerts.

More Co-Op News:
Conference at Duke: We’ve set March 29-30 for our Tech & Check conference. We’ll have more details soon.
Full Fact progress: Mevan Babakar did an impressive demo of Full Fact’s prototypes at a meeting in South Africa.
Co-Op Community Meeting: We hope to have our first Tech & Check video conference in a couple of weeks. I’ll email you with the date and time.

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Reporters’ Lab study finds poor labeling on news sitesNews labels

Reporters’ Lab study finds poor labeling on news sites

Published August 15, 2017 by Rebecca Iannucci and Bill Adair

Editor’s note: Today we’re releasing the results of our study on article labels. We’ve published an account of our findings and a few recommendations on Poynter.org. The post below has slightly more detail on our methodology and a link to our data.

To assess how well news organizations are labeling their articles, the Duke Reporters’ Lab examined articles from 49 publications.

The study was prompted by the ongoing public debate about declining trust in the news media. Some journalists and educators have said one way to improve trust is for people to better understand the type of content they’re reading.

Online journalism provides readers with access to thousands of news sources, but readers may not understand the type of article they’re reading. Our hypothesis was that many news organizations do not label article types to indicate whether they are news, analysis, opinion or a review.

Students in the Lab analyzed 49 news organizations — 25 local newspapers and 24 national news and opinion websites. Students collected 25 articles from each organization — five articles from five different sections of the publication. For each piece of content, they note, among other things, if that article had a label, what the label said, if the label was clearly defined anywhere on the page and the size, location and color of the label.

Our findings:

* Of the 49 organizations analyzed, the Reporters’ Lab found that only 20 of them — 40 percent — labeled article type at least once in at least one section of their website.

* Of the 20 organizations that did label article types, 16 of them — 80 percent — only used labels in the opinion section. Those labels included editorial (used on 15 news sites), commentary (seven sites), column or columnist (six sites) and letters (seven sites).

* Our students found none of the publications labeled content well across every section of the website.

* Of the 29 organizations that did not label content, 13 of them were local newspapers and 16 were national organizations.

* These 29 organizations often labeled the section of the website in which an article belonged such as sports or entertainment, but they did not specify the type of article being read.

The raw data of our analysis can be viewed on this spreadsheet.

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Trump’s Twitter Gang

Published February 5, 2016 by Natalie Ritchie

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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Our share of ‘the take’ on brokered conventions2016 Republican convention

Our share of ‘the take’ on brokered conventions

Published December 11, 2015 by Mark Stencel

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.

Reagan-Ford in 1976
The last time a Republican presidential nominee was still up for grabs when the party’s convention convened was nearly 40 years ago, when incumbent Gerald R. Ford survived Ronald Reagan’s challenge. Image by White House photographer William Fitz-Patrick via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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Coverage of Global Fact-Checking Summit

Published June 25, 2014 by Bill Adair

The Duke Reporters’ Lab was one of the co-sponsors of the Poynter Institute’s inaugural Global Fact-Checking Summit, held at the London School of Economics June 9-10. It attracted about 50 fact-checkers and academics from countries ranging from India to Chile.  Here’s some of the coverage received:

Washington Post, The global boom in political fact-checking

ABC Australia, Fact checking around the world: Pioneers Bill Adair and Glenn Kessler speak to ABC Fact Check

Africa Check Director Peter Cunliffe-Jones: Why fact-checking matters

Duke professor Bill Adair: Lessons from the Poynter global fact-checking summit

Tampa Bay Times Editor Neil Brown: 5 essential understandings of the fact-checking movement 

Poynter: Fact-checkers plan international organization

 

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Why Digital Tools Stay in the Shed: ‘The Goat Must Be Fed’Goat

Why Digital Tools Stay in the Shed: ‘The Goat Must Be Fed’

Published May 14, 2014 by Mark Stencel

For all the talk about digital tools and a data reporting revolution in the news business, the hype doesn’t match the reality in most American newsrooms.

That’s what we heard when the Duke Reporters’ Lab set out to understand why so many news staffs have such a difficult time figuring out how to open these digital toolboxes — even when peers at other organizations have shown what even one data-savvy journalist on staff can accomplish.

The resulting report, published today, got its title from an answer we heard in an interview with Jim Farley, the recently retired news leader at WTOP-FM in Washington, D.C., one of the best-staffed and most successful radio news operations in the country.

“We’re live and local, 24/7, 365,” Farley told us. “The goat must be fed.”

It turns out the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation — one of the news industry’s primary funders for digital tools and training — has been asking similar questions. From the point of view of Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s president and CEO, “the biggest failure we’ve had has been precisely at the point of adoption.”

Based on our interviews with senior editors and producers in more than 20 newsrooms, the Reporters’ Lab found that:

  • Many U.S. newsrooms are not taking advantage of the emerging low-cost digital tools that enable journalists to report and present their work in innovative ways. Editors and producers cling to familiar methods and practices even when they know better, more engaging digital alternatives are available, often for free.
  • Journalism awards and well-attended conferences create a sense that the adoption of data reporting and digital tools is broader than it really is. But there is a still significant gap between the industry’s digital haves and have-nots — particularly between big national organizations, which have been most willing to try data reporting and digital tools, and smaller local ones, which haven’t.
  • Local news leaders often cite budget, time and people as their biggest constraints. But conversations with the editors and producers we spoke to also revealed deeper issues — part infrastructure, part culture. This includes a lack of technical understanding and ability and an unwillingness to break reporting habits that could create time and space to experiment.
  • The local newsrooms that have made smart use of digital tools have leaders who are willing to make difficult trade-offs in their coverage. They prioritize stories that reveal the meaning and implications of the news over an overwhelming focus on chasing incremental developments. They also think of the work they can do with digital tools as ways to tell untold stories — not “bells and whistles.”

Many of the news leaders we spoke to said they and their staffs struggle with the trade-offs this work requires of them — especially when it means cutting back on what were once core elements of their routine news coverage. “We have to be really careful picking our spots — what we’re going to do and not going to do,” said Marty Kaiser, editor and senior vice president of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he has made data reporting and digital tools a priority.

The report was written by digital journalist Mark Stencel; Bill Adair, the Knight Chair for Computational Journalism at Duke; and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a student researcher in the Reporters’ Lab.

The full report is available at GoatMustBeFed.com.

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What’s next for the Reporters’ Lab

Published October 29, 2013 by Bill Adair

If journalism is in the doldrums, you wouldn’t know it from the Online News Association conference in Atlanta last weekend.

The sold-out conference offered a dizzying array of great panels and a midway that lived up to its name. Vendors ranging from Google to the Knight Foundation showcased a wide range of new digital tools for journalists. Matt Waite flew his drone.

The conference was a reminder that we’re at a moment of reinvention in journalism when we can radically improve how we tell stories and inform people. And that is our mission for the Reporters’ Lab.

I took over the lab when I became the Knight Chair at Duke a few months ago. It’s been dormant while I focused on teaching my fall classes, but now that the semester is well underway, I’ve got several projects underway. You’ll be hearing about them in the next few months.

I inherited the lab from my predecessor Sarah Cohen, a talented colleague I know from our days at the St. Petersburg Times. Sarah created the lab and used it to develop great tools for journalists.

I’ll be continuing that mission and broadening the focus. As the founder of PolitiFact, I’ve long been interested in developing new story forms. In a TED speech last year, I said it was time to blow up the news story and experiment with new forms.

We’ll be doing that in the Reporters’ Lab (although we will make sure the explosions don’t damage the Sanford building).

I’ve got some a veteran journalist and some talented students to help with our new mission:

Mark Stencel, a national leader in digital journalism who ran NPR’s website for the past four years. He’ll be writing occasional articles for our website as he explores what tools are available to journalists and what else they need.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a senior political science and film student at Duke who has written for the Nation, Alternet and the Duke Chronicle. Prashanth is researching digital tools and new story forms.

Aaron Krolik, a Duke electrical engineering student who has a talent for writing code and an interest in journalism. Aaron is developing our first digital project, which you’ll be hearing about very soon.

We’ll approach everything we do with a sense of curiosity and experimentation. We’ll try new things. Some will work. Some won’t. We welcome your feedback and suggestions. You can reach me at bill.adair@duke.edu.

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