Wednesday, August 30, 2017

DFM chat on verification of content via social media


Digital First Media friends and other journalists, members of the community and fans of journalism are invited to take part in a Twitter chat Wednesday at noon, Eastern Time, to talk about all things journalism.

Today we are talking about producing, consuming and crowdsourcing news during emergencies and natural disasters, in the wake of Harvey in Texas. As social media literacy improves, hoaxers find new ways to fool audiences, especially when news breaks. The 'old' social media tips still apply, but what do you need to look for in today's environment? What steps do we need to take as consumers and producers to make sure content we share is real?

If you want to be in the post chat archive, post a comment in the container or a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Can you be a fly on the virtual reality wall?

Pretty things are pleasant to look at, but that doesn't mean they work.

For more than a decade now, I've been trying to figure out the many ways of not just how to cover the news, but how to present the news in the best way possible.

I've been doing this from my little corner of the news landscape and I've been using the tools available to me as the baseline, if you will, for what can be done. I also do this because it's fun.

In the old days, this would come in the form of developing a new type of feature for the paper. Slowly (too slowly, if you ask me) but surely, these efforts evolved into it what encompasses the digital world. That is where things really started to bloom. There's always a risk of getting carried away by the latest shiny thing, but the underlining focus is always about what is the best tool to use to cover the news as best as possible with the limited resources that we have (and limited, they are).



Anyway, there's a new virtual reality live stream function that can be shared with people in a two-dimensional format, and I decided to take it for a spin. When Facebook Spaces first came out, I gave my first impressions. Now that it has a livestream function (and beards!), I gave it another go.