This tweet from Daniel Bentley deserves a post all on its own:
Instagram should have disabled all filters yesterday. Would have done journalism a great service.
— Daniel Bentley (@DJBentley) October 30, 2012
While some news organisations take down paywalls and others help sort hoax images from the genuine article, what role should ‘common carriers’ like Instagram play? Any at all?
Having outlined some of the data journalism processes involved in the Olympic torch relay investigation, in part 2 I want to touch on how verification and ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ played a role.
Data in this story not only provided leads which needed verifying, but also helped verify leads from outside the data. Continue reading
Neil Smith is an investigative researcher and open source intelligence trainer. In this interview, originally posted on the Help Me Investigate blog, he gives his tips for using online sources to follow people and verify information.
Answers to another set of questions around ethics and online journalism, posed by a UK student, and reproduced here as part of the FAQ series:
Yes, I think any changing situation – whether technological or cultural – presents new ethical dilemmas.
But should ‘online journalism’ have a separate code? I don’t see how it can. Where would you draw the line when most journalists work online? Ethical standards are relatively platform-agnostic, but journalists do have to revisit those when they’re working in new environments. Continue reading
A number of news outlets – including the BBC, Guardian and Channel 4 News – mentioned yesterday in their coverage of the closure of the News Of The World that TheSunOnSunday.com had been registered just two days ago. (It was also mentioned by Hugh Grant on last night’s Question Time.)
It’s a convenient piece of information for a conspiracy theory – but a little bit of digging suggests it’s unlikely to have been registered by News International as part of some grand plan.
When I tweeted the claim yesterday two people immediately pointed out key bits of contextual information from the WHOIS records:
Firstly, it is unlikely that News International would use 123-reg to register a domain name. @bigdaddymerk noted, News International “use http://bit.ly/cWSHia for their .coms and have their own IPS tag for .co.uk”
Murray Dick added that it would “be odd for big corporation to withhold info on whois record”
And – not that this is a big issue given recent events – according to @bigdaddymerk “in the case of the .co.uk registering as a UK individual would be whois abuse.” (UPDATE: The specific abuse is detailed here)
You might argue that the above might be explained by News International covering their tracks, but if were covering their tracks it’s unlikely they’d do it like this.
UPDATE: From Malc. in the comments: more digging has been done at Loutish – note the comments as well.
UPDATE 2: It seems there are other web addresses registered by other companies, too. This post points out, however, potential trademark issues (none has been registered) and conflict with Trinity Mirror.
UPDATE 3: Those other addresses are now registered to News International – but not the .com domains.
UPDATE 4: I think News Corp missed an opportunity with FoxNewsUK.com…
Anyway, digging further into the timeline of the ‘Sunday Sun’ casts further doubt on any conspiracy connected to News Of The World.
For example, it was reported over a week ago that The Sun was moving to 7-day production (thanks to Roo Reynolds, again on Twitter).
Between that announcement and the registration of TheSunOnSunday.com, anyone with a habit of domain squatting could have grabbed the domain in the hope that it would become valuable in the future.
Either way, even if it has been registered by someone at News International, the timings just don’t add up to a News Of The World-related conspiracy. Certainly it will have been a factor in deciding to close the NOTW, and plans to launch a Sun On Sunday are now likely to be accelerated (I’m amazed that they hadn’t registered the domains before, at least as a defensive move) – but it’s pretty clear that those plans pre-date the closure of NOTW.
So, as I wrote yesterday, a ‘Sunday Sun’ is not a rebranding of News Of The World. They have just closed the country’s biggest selling newspaper – its most profitable tabloid – and made 200 people redundant.
Note: this post was udpated to correct an error: the NOTW is not the highest selling English language newspaper in the world (that is probably The Times of India). Thanks to Paul Carvill in the comments for highlighting.
I’m holding a one-off training day in August on verifying information online and finding sources, in London at the Royal Society of Medicine.
In the context of various straight men pretending to be gay women, it’s quite timely.
Google have launched a ‘Search by Image’ service which allows you to find images by uploading, dragging over, or pasting the URL of an existing image.
The service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about.
(For examples where it may have been useful, look no further than this week’s Gay Syrian Blogger story, as well as the ‘dead’ Osama Bin Laden images that so many news outlets fell for)/
TinEye, a website and Firefox plugin, does the same thing – but it will be interesting to see if Google’s service is more or less powerful (let me know how you get on with it) Find it here. Video here.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99BfDnBZcI]
Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror today – among with several others in the US (including the New York Post, which credits the image to AP) and other countries – published an image purporting to be that of the dead Osama Bin Laden.
It clearly wasn’t.
Any journalist with a drop of cynicism would have questioned the source of the images – even if they did appear on Pakistan television.
It certainly passed the ‘Too good to be true’ test.
Instead, it was users of Reddit and Twitter who first highlighted the dodgy provenance of the image, and the image it was probably based on. Knight News and MSNBC’s Photo blog‘s followed soon after.
It took me all of 10 seconds to verify that it is a fake – by using TinEye to find other instances of the image, I found this example from last April.
But instead of owning up that their image was a fake, both The Daily Mail and Mirror appear to have simply removed the image from their site, leaving that image to circulate amongst their users. Ego, pure and simple.
Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification.
Where did the journalist go wrong? They asked for the emails confirming the internship, but accepted a screengrab. This turned out to be photoshopped.
They then asked for further emails from earlier in the process, and he sent those (which were genuine) on.
They should have asked the source to forward the original email.
Of course, he could have faked that pretty easily as well (I’m not going to say how here), so you would need to check the IP address of the email against that of the company it was supposed to be from.
An IP address is basically the location of a computer (server). This may be owned by the ISP you are using, or the company which employs you and provides your computer and internet access.
This post explains how to find IP addresses in an email using email clients including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook – and then how to track the IP address to a particular location.
This website will find out the IP address for a particular website – the IP address for Internships.com is 204.74.99.100, for example. So you’re looking for a match (assuming the same server is used for mail). You could also check other emails from that company to other people, or ideally to yourself (Watch out for fake websites as well, of course).
And of course, finally, it’s always worth looking at the content the hoaxer has provided and clues that they may have left in it – as Jonny did (see image, left).
For more on verifying online information see Content, context and code: verifying information online, which I’ll continue to update with examples.
When the telephone first entered the newsroom journalists were sceptical. “How can we be sure that the person at the other end is who they say they are?” The question seems odd now, because we have become so used to phone technology that we barely think of it as technology at all – and there are a range of techniques we use, almost unconsciously, to verify what the person on the other end of the phone is saying, from their tone of voice, to the number they are ringing from, and the information they are providing.
Dealing with online sources is no different. How do you know the source is telling the truth? You’re a journalist, for god’s sake: it’s your job to find out.
In many ways the internet gives us extra tools to verify information – certainly more than the phone ever did. The apparent ‘facelessness’ of the medium is misleading: every piece of information, and every person, leaves a trail of data that you can use to build a picture of its reliability.
The following is a three-level approach to verification: starting with the content itself, moving on to the context surrounding it; and finishing with the technical information underlying it. Most of the techniques outlined take very little time at all but the key thing is to look for warning signs and follow those up. Continue reading