Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 11, 2017

Online Verification Course (First Draft) [Open To Public – January 2018]

Filed under: Journalism,News,Reporting,Verification — Patrick Durusau @ 10:17 pm

First Draft launches its online verification training course

From the post:

Journalists strive to get the story right, but as we are bombarded by far more information than ever before, the tools and skills crucial to telling the whole story are undergoing a profound change. Understanding who took the photo or video, who created the website and why, enables journalists to meet these challenges. Verification training, up until now, has largely been done on the job and as needed. But today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our online verification course.

In this course, we teach you the steps involved in verifying the eyewitness media, fabricated websites, visual memes and manipulated videos that emerge on social media. The course is designed so that anyone can take the course from start to finish online, or educators can take elements and integrate into existing classroom teaching. For newsroom training managers, we hope the you can encourage your staff to take the course online, or you can take individual videos and tutorials and use during brown-bag lunches. We provide relevant and topical examples — from events such as Hurricane Irma and the conflict in Syria — to show how these skills and techniques are put into practice.

The course is open only to First Draft partners until January 2018, so consider that as an incentive for your organization to become a First Draft partner!

I haven’t seen the course material but the video introduction:

and the high quality of all other First Draft materials, sets high expectations for the verification course.

Looking forward to a First Draft course on skepticism for journalists, which uses the recent Wall Street Journal repetition of government slanders about Kerspersky Lab, which is subsequently discovered to be: “we (Israel) broke into the Kerpersky house and while robbing the place saw another burglar (Russia) there and they were looking for NSA software, so we alerted the NSA.” How Israel Caught Russian Hackers Scouring the World for U.S. Secrets

Only an editor suffering from nationalism to the point being a mental disorder would publish such a story without independent verification. Could well all be true but when all the sources are known liars, something more is necessary before reporting it as “fact.”

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