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Hours Friday, May 30, 2025 |
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| Library @ Lodi | Closed |
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Hours Friday, May 30, 2025 |
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| Library @ Lodi | Closed |
There's "no other job where you get paid to tell the truth...we are detectives for the people." The late, great investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, in his last column for the Village Voice.
Because “journalism is a discipline of verification,” that journalists consider the commitment to verification and accuracy a “strategic ritual” and part of their “professional identity,” which is “something that legitimizes a journalist’s social role as being demonstrably different from other communicators.”A devotion to accuracy is the value that journalists add to issues and stories in the information ecosystem.
Always ask yourself these questions when trying to verify information: "Who says?", "How do they know?", "Are they biased?", and "What don't I know?"
Be Credible: Information Literacy for Journalism, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing Students by 
Ad campaign created by Mark Graham (CD, Art Director) with Josh Tavlin (CD) and John McNeil (CD) for Brill's Content: Skepticism is a Virtue.
Use this Newmark J-School Accuracy Checklist for Reporters. Make an Accuracy Checklist a part of your reporting process.
Accuracy checklists via Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error
Steve Buttry’s Expanded Version of Craig Silverman’s Accuracy Checklist
Accuracy Checklist for Journalists, Reynolds Center for Business Journalism
Accuracy tips from E.W. Scripps School of Journalism
Accuracy tip sheet from Mathew Lee, as part of the Knight Citizen News Network
Fact-checking guides relating to politics:
7 steps to better fact-checking - Politifact
Fact-checking resources: A guide to finding reliable answers to timely questions - American Press Institute
What Do I Check?
Where do I fact check?
Common Errors
Frequent Sources of Error
Avoiding Confirmation Bias in Searches from Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
Confirmation Bias
"subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses. Therefore, confirmation bias is both affected by and feeds our implicit biases. It can be most entrenched around beliefs and ideas that we are strongly attached to or that provoke a strong emotional response." Confirmation and Other Biases From the Unit: Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age
How to Thwart Your Confirmation Bias
From Twenty ways to cultivate an open mind, From Overcoming Bias, A Journalist's Guide to culture & context
Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
"This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.
This guide will show you how to use date filters to find the source of viral content, how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds, and how to see if a tweet is really from the famous person you think it is or from an impostor. It’ll show you how to find pages that have been deleted, figure out who paid for the website you’re looking at, and whether the weather portrayed in that viral video actual matches the weather in that location on that day. It’ll show you how to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. It’ll teach you to parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And it’ll show you how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms."
Five Pillars of Verification from First Draft
PROVENANCE: Are you looking at the original account, article, or piece of content?
SOURCE: Who created the account or article, or captured the original piece of content?
DATE: When was it created?
LOCATION: Where was the account established, the website created, or piece of content captured?
MOTIVATION: Why was the account established, the website created, or the piece of content captured?
First Draft Essential Guides covering newsgathering, verification, responsible reporting and more
First Draft verification and Open-Source-Intelligence Techniques (OSINT) training, in support of journalists facing the challenges of trust and truth in the digital age.
Always Verify User Generated Sources. Verification of content and sources:
Bellingcat's Digital Forensics Tools
What are fact-checking sites saying about the source?