Social media
Off the clock? Not in this business
Reporters are under a microscope today — both on and off the job. Nearly 25 years ago, after Timothy McVeigh ignited a Ryder truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds of others, students at the University of Oklahoma’s student newspaper, The Oklahoma Daily, […]
Apply for our summer internship in news analytics
Update: The application period for this position is now closed. The American Press Institute is hiring a paid summer intern to learn about audience engagement and help us share best practices in audience analytics with the wider journalism industry. This person should be a college student or recent graduate with interest in the following: The […]
How surveillance concerns affect national security journalists
This piece is part of API’s Research Review series, which highlights academic research that could be relevant and useful to the news industry. We also hope that this series will spark ideas among academics with an interest in researching the news. Today’s journalists owe so much to modern technologies like social media, mobile apps, digital recording devices […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: Growing pains, Jurassic Park, California dreamin’
“A dark cloud hangs over us. The disaffection and distrust that have plagued mainstream media outlets for many years is now spilling over to fact-checkers.” Those were among the remarks Alexios delivered at the fifth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit in Rome last week, where more than 200 fact-checkers from 56 gathered to share best practices. In a report […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: All grown up and ‘no longer a fresh-faced movement’
ROME, Italy – This week, at the fifth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit, 200 fact-checkers gathered to share best practices, demo innovative technology and discuss problems that misinformation poses to the media industry. In conjunction with the conference, the International Fact-Checking Network published a report that takes a look behind the curtain of several different fact-checking projects. Check out the […]
What journalists can learn from their local TV weather forecast
Earlier this month, the American Press Institute presented an idea that we believe could help with two challenges confronting journalism: a continuing decline in trust by much of the public, and a lack of understanding about media and its functions. We believe that if stories are built differently — using forms that follow a philosophy […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: Zika rumors and other reasons ‘fake news’ is bad for your health
When it comes to Zika, rumors could fare better than real news on social media —making disease prevention efforts more difficult. That’s according to a study from Alexios and four other researchers, which looks at the engagement of verified stories vs. popular rumors about the virus. Drawing upon audience statistics from BuzzSumo, the authors found that hoaxes […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: Fake ‘royal’ expert, fake news in court, Harry Potter the fact-checker
First up this week: Let’s take a look at the fun side of fact-checking. Daniel Radcliffe, the original “Harry Potter,” will star in the Broadway production of the 2012 book “The Lifespan of a Fact.” PolitiFact re-upped its fact check of Jake Tapper and Ben Shapiro’s comic book beef on Twitter. John Oliver fact-checks the meaning of “guardianship” with […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: Authoritarians, ‘morons’ and ‘household surveys’
Fact-checking is always hard. In some countries, though, it’s potentially dangerous: Journalists not only risk losing their right to publish, they may risk imprisonment. So how are fact-checkers covering politics in authoritarian countries? Writing for Poynter, Daniel Funke examines veteran projects in Iran, Turkey and Zimbabwe – and the prospects for fact-checking in even more […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: Under attack, a Trump deepfake and Murphy Brown
Facebook’s fact-checking tool was rolled out in Brazil last week in partnership with Aos Fatos and Agência Lupa. A flood of accusations of “censorship” and “extreme-left bias” followed. More worrying still were personal attacks and heavy insults levelled against fact-checkers on social media. As the IFCN’s Alexios Mantzarlis wrote for Folha on Friday, in Brazil, polarization seems to be […]