Jane Elizabeth
Jane Elizabeth, a media consultant, is the former managing editor of The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun in North Carolina. She has been an editor and manager in newsrooms including The Washington Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Virginian-Pilot; and is the American Press Institute’s former director of accountability journalism. Jane holds a master’s degree in mass communications from Virginia Commonwealth University, and was a 2017 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She currently serves on advisory boards for Radford University and the Freedom Forum Institute’s Power Shift Project. Reach her at jane@janeelizabeth.net.
7 questions to help local media rebound in 2021
Worldwide, the lives of most journalists have been consumed over the past 12 months by cataclysmic events both anticipated and unexpected. But no media organization has been battered more than the local newsroom. Journalists in America’s towns and small cities were the first responders to massive COVID-19 outbreaks, police shootings, protests, violent demonstrations, fractious political […]
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 […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: The criminalization of misinformation
While actions against the publication of fake news have proceed cautiously in the U.S. — blame the First Amendment — things are moving right along in many parts of the world. Malaysia’s newly elected prime minister is leaning towards keeping a controversial anti-fake news law that passed in early April. The Committee to Protect Journalists asked the Kenyan president not to […]
The Week in Fact-Checking: The real researchers behind fake news
Over the past year, interest in misinformation research has ballooned. In order to highlight some of the people working behind the scenes, Poynter’s Daniel Funke profiled just a few of the researchers whose work has changed Facebook’s fact-checking program, been cited in countless pieces on fake news and is developing solutions for debunking deepfake videos. The article […]