News in a Post-Truth Era

Credible or click-bait? News literacy? Checking facts? "Fake News"? which is, at best, just false or at worst a lie.

How can you tell what's credible and what isn't? This needs to be taught, effectively and without bias. But how? The audience is ... middle- and high-schoolers. College students. Even adults!

I'm gathering the best articles and lesson plans and adding them to a guide I created:

It includes resources for evaluating news sources (I love you, AllSides.com!), lesson plans, and fact-checking websites. I'm tweaking a great checklist on evaluating news sites based on Evaluating news sites: Credible or Clickbait? by Candice Benjes-Small. Sooner or later, I'm going to add my favorite articles on the topic.

For now, I'll list some of them here:

• Knight Foundation. "How Youth Navigate the News Landscape." 2017, https://www.knightfoundation.org/reports/how-youth-navigate-the-news-landscape.
• Ostenson, Jonathan. "Reconsidering the Checklist in Teaching Internet Source Evaluation." portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 14, 2014, pp. 33-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2013.0045. 
• Valenza, Joyce. "Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: A News Literacy Toolkit for a “Post-Truth” World." School Library Journal. 2016, http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/.
• Wineburg, Sam et al. "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning." Stanford History Education Group, 2016, http://purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt593

I've been pondering this quite a bit lately and am speaking on the topic of teaching news literacy to a few different audiences. First to the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association advisors, then to a group of SILS and MEJO students at UNC on March 31, and to the Society or Professional Journalists Region 2 conference April 8 at Elon University.

Do you have a favorite resource for teaching how to evaluate news credibility? Do share!

AP Videos - free! online!

The Associated Press has just uploaded "one million minutes of historical footage" to YouTube! It's an impressive collection.  Check it out on YouTube, or read their July 2015 press release AP makes one million minutes of historical footage available on YouTube; they say there will be over 550,000 videos from 1895 to present.

If you're a librarian or a search geek, however, you might want to head on over to the AP Archive page at http://www.aparchive.com/ which offers more search and browsing options. The search box is decent, permitting quotes and Boolean operators. The Advanced search pulldown, right next to the search box lets you search by date or decade, and also lets you specific color, aspect ratio, and original source.

The "Compilations" section offers pre-selected content on several subjects, such as

• Accidents & Disasters
• Conflicts & terrorism
• Space Exploration
• Fashion & Lifestyle
• Sports

I discovered a challenge with dates on YouTube, which is troubling, because those are so important in searching for past events.

On YouTube, the dates range from unclear to actually wrong. I've seen some videos that say "published on July XX, 2015" which could be true. But I've seen videos about the death of Princess Diana (for example), that also say "published on July XX, 2015."  This could be true, if they are saying that the video was published to YouTube on that date. But it's impossible to find the video's original date - aired or shot - on YouTube.

The archive site is much better on date display. A story about the Ferguson police chief has a "Date: 08/10/2014 05:18 PM" field. Presumably, that's the date that the video was aired, which was also presumably close to the date that it was shot.

It's much easier to share / reuse AP videos on YouTube, since they use the usual share and embed options. Here's a video of Panda Awareness Week in 20102 (tho' I don't know when in 2012):


I found a neat video of the Macy's Day Parade on Nov. 24, 1966, but I cannot easily share it. I emailed it to myself and have the link: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/view/13e43ef12e802047edf49dc863668a46?subClipIn=00:00:00&subClipOut=00:01:31 but it would be nice to be able to embed that too.

Still, for free, this is pretty awesome.

Collecting News Style Guides; need Visual Style Guides

I'm building a collection of stylebooks for newspaper and other news outlets. The collection primarily includes titles from various newspapers in the United States, such as the the "AJC (Atlanta Journal & Constitution) Style : Style and Reference Guide Covering News, Sports, Business and Features Issues"(1998);  "The Kansas City Star Stylebook" (1987); "The Los Angeles Times Stylebook" (1979 & 1995) … and so many more. Browse the titles in our collection.

We have local stylebooks: The News & Observer, 2001-2005; the Daily Tar Heel (1932 and 2001); plus the "Stylebook of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication" (1983-present), and which is now online only (pdf).

We have books for usage when covering different groups, such as the "CNS (Catholic News Service) Stylebook on Religion;" the "GLAAD Media Reference Guide;" and the "Manual de Estilo" from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

We have stylebook from various wire services — of course we have the Associated Press stylebook for many years (our first edition is from 1953), as well as "A handbook of Reuters Journalism : A Guide To Standards, Style, Operations" (2008); various editions of "The Bloomberg Way : A Guide for Reporters and Editors;" and the "United Press Radio News Style Book" (1943).

There are some for non-journalism entities, such as the "Style book and editorial manual" from the American Medical Association (c1965)

Most of our stylebooks are from the United States, but we have one from Canada ("The Gazette Style" c1995) and two from the UK ("Stylebook of the Manchester Guardian Style," 1928 and "BBC News Style Guide," c2014).

HOWEVER, we don't have any guides to the use of graphics, fonts, or illustrations in a newspaper, magazine, or website. Our books focus almost exclusively on the use of text, grammar, and punctuation. Earlier this semester, the design & graphic editors at the Daily Tar Heel asked for some graphic style guides, thus illuminating a glaring hole in our collection.

At my colleague Andy Bechtel's request, I solicited the assistance of visual journalist and social media savant Charles Apple, who blogged my request for visual style guides: The University of North Carolina seeks your style guides.

Happily, I received one from Stacie Greene Hidek, the Online Editor at the (Wilmington) StarNews. We're sending it to the bindery so that it will withstand use by patrons for many years to come.

Text Visualization / Content Analysis with @VoyantTools

Many of my research colleagues do content analysis on newspapers, and there's a new tool which may provide useful to them. Let's explore Voyant Tools, a "web-based reading and analysis environment" which provides lots of high-level insight into text.

 I did a quick LexisNexis search on articles written in college newspapers about sexual assault and pasted a few of them into Voyant-Tools.org. You can see the word cloud above as well as the text on the right.

If you click on any of the words in the cloud or in the text itself you'll also see where in the document the term appears, and you can see a list of Keywords in Context.

Click on the plus-sign next to the phrase, and you see more of the context.

I was able to export a URL for this Keywords in Context chart, so you can see it in all its glory.

There are myriad other export features in the tool, including a list of words by count, comma- and tab-separated options, and more.

It seems like a good option for exploring text on a very broad level. And it's a quick way to provide graphics for publications or presentations on your text analysis.

There is a stop-word list so you can exclude common words; you can edit this list as well (I excluded lots of common LexisNexis terminology like "u-wire" and "document;" should I have excluded "said" as well?). It is possible to upload multiple documents, so that you can compare coverage of a topic in one newspaper against coverage in another paper.

Some of the limitations for newspaper research include:

• It's not possible to analyze pdfs, for relatively obvious reasons; but this eliminates the ability to search many historic newspapers which are available online only as pdfs.
• If you export multiple stories from LexisNexis or America's News, they are exported as one document, which makes it impossible to compare documents against each other in Voyant-Tools. To do this kind of analysis, you'd need to export the documents one at a time, which would quickly get tiresome.

Here's a screen shot of an analysis I did of eight individually downloaded articles from LexisNexis -- that process was a bit cumbersome, but the data is interesting:

The chart at right shows the number of times the word "women" appears in each of the eight artcles. You can see a quick analysis of all the words in the eight articles under the Word cloud (or here).

This has great potential in the newspaper content analysis toolbox.

Free TV News Online!

The Internet Archive has Launched "TV News Search & Borrow" with 375,000 Broadcasts, which they blogged about back in September.

From the blog post: "375,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C.  The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired.  Older materials are also being added."  

A search for "librarians" on TV News on 11/02/12.

My review of the site indicates that all the major U.S. networks are included, as are several Spanish networks (Telemundo and Univision). CSPAN and Comedy Central are there too. (you can see Jon Stewart from 2009-yesterday!)

Access it directly at archive.org or from the Park Library's TV News page.

The New Yorker & The News Biz

After many years, I am finally subscribing to the New Yorker again. Not in print, but via their Digital Reader. I'm blogging about it because I like their model: the Digital Reader adds something I wouldn't get from the library version, and I feel like this new model bears watching as we migrate from print to online.

The Digital Reader offers a digital flip-through version of the print magazine - I wish I could show you this via a screen shot, but you have to try it to believe it. Click on the white circle within the grey triangle to move from page to page. You see the cover in all its colorful glory, the cartoons, advertisements, and, of course, entire stories. As a long-time New Yorker reader (over 40 years!), I love that I can again see the articles in context - with adjacent cartoons, snarky comments after the articles end, and that unique New Yorker font. I am excited again about reading the New Yorker -- I eagerly check my email on Monday mornings to browse the table of contents online.

But as a librarian in the world of journalism, I am excited about the model, too, because it seems like it just might be sustainable, or at least a step in the right direction. The New Yorker charged me $40 for this access, and I'm so happy about it, I'm blogging it. Points to them for peer promotion. Plus, they get to tell advertisers that folks are seeing their ads, even in the online version. I'd guess that advertisers get little or no benefit from readers accessing magazine archives through a library database. And presumably, readers themselves are happy about it, because they can read just the articles they want, in the familiar New Yorker format.

Blogger Jason Kottke gave a thoughtful list of pros & cons to the new interface in November 2008, in which I learned that the archives go back to 1925, and the site works on an iPhone. I agree that some improvements could be made to the interface, and I encountered some technical problems early on. It works well enough now on Mac FireFox, but printing isn't great on Safari.

I know that online access isn't the best option for all readers, but clearly the trend is for more online access to media-formerly-available-only-in-print. This is the first online foray by a print outlet that has captured my imagination AND persuaded me to open my wallet. I hope that other print publications will watch this and attempt their own versions.

For More Information

• New Yorker Digital Reader, 4-week trial offer.
  
• Kottke, Jason. The New Yorker's online Digital Reader, an evaluation. blog post, November 11, 2008.
  

Susan Stamberg & Early NPR Days

Two interesting interviews with Susan Stamberg about the early days of NPR:

Bob Edwards interviewed her in November 2008 for his eponymous XM Radio show, and it was both entertaining and informative. They discussed some of her interviews, including Henri Cartier Bresson and Jorge Mester; they also talked about the monkey version of her cranberry relish recipe. Stamberg talked to Edwards about the very early days of being on the air at NPR, including a vignette about his early work as a newscaster. I laughed out loud while listening on the bus.

The interview is available on Audible, where it is described:

In the early 1970's, Susan Stamberg was one of the first producers hired by the fledgling National Public Radio and later she became the first woman to anchor its nightly news program, All Things Considered. Bob talks with Stamberg about her experience as a radio pioneer, what she feels makes a great interview and the true story behind her mother-in-law's Thanksgiving cranberry relish.

More recently, NPR librarian Jo Ella Straley interviewed "The Mother of Public Radio" and posted the 17 minute piece on the NPR library blog, A Matter of Fact.

For More Information

• Edwards, Bob. Interview with Susan Stamberg. The Bob Edwards Show, XM Radio. November 27, 2008. Available on Audible for $2.95 and through iTunes as Bob Edwards Weekend.
• Clements, Maureen & Jo Ella Straley. First File: Susan Stamberg. Blog: A Matter of Fact. July 9, 2009.
• bonus: finding aids for the Susan Stamberg Collection at the University of Maryland Libraries.

Aural Synesthesia?

I was recently in DC for conference of special librarians and I was lucky enough to have a tour of the NPR building. My guide, library director Laura Soto-Barra, asked about my favorite shows on NPR.

News junkie that I am, I said that the top- and bottom-of-the-hour newscasts are tops on my list of NPR shows. Laura thoughtfully took me over to the area where the newscasters work and I was thrilled to meet Ann Taylor and Jack Speer, who speak just the way they sound on the air. I also met the other folks who make the newscast happen, producer Rob Schaefer; editor Jeanine Herbst; and associate producer Whitney Jones. I admit to gawking like a kid. (I was also excited to meet The Two-Way blogger Frank James, who sits in their corner).

The tour continued, and as we walked around the building, I heard the reporters' voices in my head as I saw name plates on cubicles and doors. Claudio Sanchez, Bob Boilen, Felix Contreras, Michel Martin. I didn't meet any of them, mind you, just saw them or even their name plates -- and yet I imagined their voices so clearly it was as if I were actually hearing them. Is this aural synesthesia? Or does everyone hear voices in their heads when they see names?

Regardless, I appreciated the tour and meeting some of the newscasters.

For more about the NPR library, check out the NPR librarians' blog As a Matter of Fact and read their response to Frequently Asked Questions about the library

Future of Journalism? Newspapers?

I heard a neat interview on Radio Times today about the future of journalism & news.  It was surprisingly, and happily, upbeat (or maybe it was just my mood).  Listening to the conversation, I felt optimistic that while news gathering as we know it may change, but that reporting and writing will not change so much as to be unrecognizable.  I even felt optimistic that some kind of revenue stream could perhaps be worked out so that in-depth reporting (ie, what we think of now as print journalism) could continue.  Probably it won't look the same, but maybe it will continue to exist.  

One surprising bit of information that one of the guests mentioned (and I forget which; I was driving and didn't take notes) is that actual readership of content-formerly-known-as-print- journalism is UP, after a slide that started in the 1940s.

Here's what Radio Times says about the show:  "We talk about the challenges facing the profession of journalism and consumers of the news. How will we fund news-gathering operations, what will they look like how will we access the news and how we will ensure quality journalism? Our guests are ROBERT NILES of Online Journalism Review and TOM ROSENSTIEL of The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism."

For More Information

• Radio Times, Challenges Facing the Profession of Journalism.  February 12, 2009.  Audio will be available shortly online and through iTunes.

Today's Front Pages

On special news days, I like to head over to the Newseum to browse the front pages of newspapers across the United States and around the world.

You can browse all 674 (as of today) or you can just look at the front pages by region, like the US, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and more.  If you click on the thumbnail image, you'll see a blown up image of the front page.

You can also look at archived pages for special events, like when the Phillies won the World Series, the first day of the Olympics, or Sept. 12, 2001.