At the end of last week PolitiFact announced it had launched a partnership with the Poynter Institute to create the PolitiFact Lab: “an initiative that will oversee joint projects and educational programmes on fact-checking”.
According to a statement from PolitiFact the lab will promote best practice and carry out fact-checking research.
The partnership will be modelled after the success of joint programs that Poynter and PolitiFact created in 2010 for PolitiFact Florida, a unique partnership of the Times, the Miami Herald and other Florida newspapers. It was underwritten by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Collins Center for Public Policy and the Craigslist Charitable Fund.
There was a fascinating session at the World Editors Forum today titled ‘looking beyond the article’, which saw a number of speakers discuss the news game, and the ways news outlets are using gamification methods to offer wider context and understanding to news stories, events and scenarios.
One of the first speakers, Bill Adair, who is founder and editor of PolitiFact said he felt there was “a tremendous lack of imagination” in the industry in how to take advantage of new publishing platforms.
It’s like we’ve been given a brand new canvas with this whole palette of colours and we’re only painting in grey. We need to bring all the other colours to this new canvas.
He later said:
Many of us are slaves to our content management systems, which are slaves to the old way we were publishing. We have to think beyond that.
Scott Klein, editor of news applications at ProPublica, shared many examples of news apps which are doing just that. Klein’s presentation of these examples can be found at this link.
He told the conference that as well as adding context a news app has the ability to personalise and place the user at the centre of the story and offer them the ability to see the impact on them, “it doesn’t just tell a story, it tells your story”, he said.
You can hear him speak more about this in the audio interview below:
Another member of the panel was Bobby Schweizer, co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play. He said video games give the opportunity to look beyond the traditional news story and called on conference delegates to try and “make something”.
And he himself is trying to help make this happen, working on the development of new software called the Cartoonist to help journalists produce their own news games, a project which won Knight News funding last year.
In the short audio clip below I ask him more about what this software will offer journalists:
When asked about the implications of news games being able to be created quickly and potentially running alongside more breaking forms of the story, Schweizer said news outlets and journalists need to ask themselves why they are making the game.
You have to ask what do you have to gain over a written article? If you only need to answer who, what, when and where maybe you don’t need a game. This has to be a balance that each organisation will have to find for themselves.
PolitiFact, the fact-checking website developed by US paper the St Petersburg Times and used during last year’s US presidential campaigns, will reportedly announce a major syndication deal with local newspapers.
The Pulitzer-prize winning site uses reporters and editors from the Times to fact-check statements made by senior politicians, lobbyists and interest groups in the US and rank the on a Truth-O-Meter. Barack Obama’s campaign promises are also being measured.
Matt Waite, the principal developer of Pulitzer-prize winning PolitiFact, ‘a data-driven site that fact checks things powerful people in Washington D.C. are saying,’ shares the lessons he learnt while building the site. ‘Demos, not memos’, is key, he says.
It seems that – for President Elect Obama – ‘Change’ will come at the cost of incredible scrutiny.
American newspaper journal Editor & Publisher has posted news on its website of a new addition to feature on the PolitiFact website: The Obameter.
The idea is simple: to keep track of the progress made by the 44th President of the United States on every single policy promise made during his electoral campaign. According to PolitiFact, that’s 510 promises in total.
Three status rankings, ‘stalled’, ‘in the works’ or ‘no action’ will be used to indicate how well these promises are developing. Once the action is deemed to be complete, PolitiFact rates whether the promise has been kept or broken.
Even though the President Elect doesn’t officially take office until tomorrow’s inauguration, already PolitiFact claims two promises have been kept, while one is stalled and nine are ‘in the works’ (including Promise No. 502: ‘Getting his daughters a puppy’).
The Obameter will run in parallel to PolitiFact’s established, Truth-o-Meter, which examines official statements from Washington DC and public official consistency yardstick, the Flip-O-Meter.
The site, which was developed by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly used its Truth-O-Meter to rank candidates’ statements during the US presidential campaigns.
It was previously recognised by the Knight Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism and though it’s been on a break since the elections, a statement on the site says it will return in January.
