Susan Benkelman
Susan is the former Director of Accountability Journalism at API.
Susan joined API in November 2018 to lead its project to improve and expand accountability journalism. Before joining API, Susan worked for five years as a news editor in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Previously she was the editorial director at CQ-Roll Call, holding the top newsroom job at the company formed by the merger of Roll Call and Congressional Quarterly, where she spent 15 years as an editor. Previously, Susan was been a reporter at Newsday in Washington, New York and Moscow, and before that was in the Washington and Lansing bureaus for the Detroit News. Originally from Michigan, she holds a degree in Journalism from Michigan State University.
How community listening can help shape election-year coverage
Last year, API distributed small grants before the midterm elections to help fuel listening experiments led by 31 news organizations across the country, legacy and startup newsrooms across digital, print and broadcast platforms. What did they learn from these sessions, and how might those lessons be integrated into their elections coverage in the future?
Opinion journalism and sustainability: Publishers find out what works
Opinion editors today are actively engaged in demonstrating to their publishers that their content contributes to the bottom line. While they say their primary mission is to inform the community, engage in meaningful discourse and influence outcomes, they also see reader data, and reader revenue, as an important part of their work.
Addressing misinformation with audiences under 40: An industry challenge
News organizations need to figure out how to show Gen Z and Millennials why their content is more trustworthy than everything else on the internet
Guiding people to practical information: Key takeaways from experiments in ‘service journalism’
Service journalism is having a moment. Newsrooms large and small are discovering — and in some cases, rediscovering — that they can find traction in giving consumers practical information, on subjects ranging from voting to student debt to COVID-19, in a confusing world. With midterm elections approaching, economic concerns multiplying and the pandemic grinding onward, […]
Factually: Will Trump’s example change how politicians handle the truth?
As the Trump era comes to a close, a big question for fact-checkers and other journalists covering the next administration is whether his mendacity has diluted the standard of truthfulness that we can expect from American leaders. Will fact-checkers call politicians on their falsehoods only to hear them repeated again and again? Has President Trump […]
Factually: Minding the knowledge gap on COVID-19 vaccine
Last week, Facebook announced it would be taking a more proactive role in fighting COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in an effort to support public health efforts to address the global pandemic. However, in an interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” First Draft co-founder and U.S. director Claire Wardle argued that much of the misinformation about the pandemic response may fly […]
Factually: Fact-checking the next president
One of the most revealing moments in American fact-checking in 2020 occurred in September when CNN’s Daniel Dale was asked about President Donald Trump’s claim on Fox News that Joe Biden’s campaign was run by people “in the dark shadows.” Dale just shook his head. “It’s almost too stupid to fact-check,” he told his CNN colleague […]
Factually: Global fact-checkers find strength in numbers
Fact-checking is a form of journalism, and journalism is, at heart, a competitive sport. But when faced with this year’s dual fire hoses of political and COVID-19 misinformation, fact-checkers have had little choice but to work together. The Paris Peace Forum, a yearly gathering of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations working to solve global problems, highlighted […]
Factually: The next COVID-19 misinformation wave
Pfizer’s announcement this week that it had a 90% effective vaccine against COVID-19 provided a glimpse of the wave of mis- and disinformation that could engulf any effort to bring about broad distribution – and acceptance – of such a vaccine. The announcement itself was the subject of a conspiracy theory: that it came out […]
Factually: The wait for final results gives misinformers an opening
This tweet from Factually’s founding father, former IFCN director Alexios Mantzarlis, sums it up perfectly — the longer we go without a definitive presidential election winner, the greater the opportunity there is for misinformation. Nowhere is that phenomenon clearer than in Pennsylvania, a swing state whose results are expected to take longer than most. As New York […]