“You can no longer solely rely on your human skills as a fact checker”

The Weekly Wrap: May 24, 2024

“You can no longer solely rely on your human skills as a fact checker”

Any journalist who’s covering an election this year — the biggest election year in history — should read the feature by Andrew that we published this week. Headlined “Indian journalists are on the frontline in the fight against election deepfakes,” it discusses how journalists in India are finding that “standard reporting strategies” and fact-checking methods like reverse image searches are no longer enough to verify whether images, audio, and video are real or fake.

One thing I like about this story is that it takes the narrative beyond “journalists are overwhelmed” to look into actual solutions and things that Indian journalists on the ground are doing to verify or debunk deepfakes. That “often requires building relationships with academic researchers, disinformation-focused nonprofits, and developers behind commercial AI detection tools, within India and abroad,” Andrew writes. He notes the benefits for reporters of working with local researchers. “The beauty of our approach has been, with respect to audio, that it is multilingual,” Mayank Vatsa, who runs a verification tool from his lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Jodhpur, “and, with respect to video and images, that it encompasses the diversity of skin tone in the Indian context…if you have language diversity available to you to train on, then you actually get much better performance, and higher confidence.”

Still, Indian journalists sometimes find more success working with researchers abroad. Nilesh Christopher, an independent journalist based in Bangalore (and a 2024-2025 Nieman Fellow), told Andrew that political self-censorship is a problem. Indian organizations, fearing political backlash, will often only agree to do forensic analysis off the record. “Once the startups weigh in on a specific political issue, they face the risk of the politician coming after them,” Christopher said, adding, “I’m quite confident that none of them would take up detection if it’s a very contentious high-stakes election issue…that hinders and pushes journalists behind in the news cycle as we try to report the truth.”

Even after India’s elections are over on June 1, these issues will remain. “While the current infrastructure for deepfake detection is being pressure tested in India right now,” Andrew writes, “the reporting strategies being carved out by journalists during the election offer a preview into the challenges that lie ahead for other newsrooms around the world.”

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

Postcards and laundromat visits: The Texas Tribune audience team experiments with IRL distribution As social platforms falter for news, a number of nonprofit outlets are rethinking distribution for impact and in-person engagement. By Sarah Scire.

Radio Ambulante launches its own record label as a home for its podcast’s original music “So much of podcast music is background, feels like filler sometimes, but with our composers, it never is.” By Hanaa' Tameez.

How uncritical news coverage feeds the AI hype machine “The coverage tends to be led by industry sources and often takes claims about what the technology can and can’t do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contribute to the hype cycle.” By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

Indian journalists are on the frontline in the fight against election deepfakes The ongoing general election is a pressure test for how to report on political voice clones and video spoofs. By Andrew Deck.

Welcome to the neighborhood! How Documented brings NYC immigration news to Nextdoor’s Caribbean communities “We are bringing onto this platform — where people usually talk about their lost cat or that they’re looking for an apartment — serious news content sparking a new kind of conversation.” By Hanaa' Tameez.

ProPublica’s new “50 states” commitment builds on a decade-plus of local news partnerships With annual revenue of $45 million and a staff approaching 200 people, ProPublica has been one of the big journalism winners of the past decade. And it’s been unusually willing to spread that wealth around the country. By Joshua Benton.

“Journalism moves fast…philanthropy moves slow.” Press Forward’s director wants to bring them together “I see, every week, some example of where the two don’t understand each other. Each of them needs to shift a little bit.” By Sophie Culpepper.

After criticism over “viewpoint diversity,” NPR adds new layers of editorial oversight “We will all have to adjust to a new workflow. If it is a bottleneck, it will be a failure.” By Sarah Scire.

Highlights from elsewhereWashington Post / Heather KellyMeta walked away from news. Now the company’s using it for AI content →“Meta’s new chatbot, Meta AI, is happy to scan news outlets and summarize their latest stories and headlines for anyone who asks. It’s even doing it in Canada, where the company banned links to news sources on Facebook and Instagram in August to get around a law that could require it to pay publishers.”Twitter / Max TaniThe Washington Post has suffered a 50% drop-off in audience since 2020 →Washington Post CEO Will Lewis also says the paper lost $77 million over the past year: “To be direct, we are in a hole, and we have been for some time.”The Guardian / Archie BlandThe New Yorker’s Lucy Letby story shows U.K.’s media-suppressing law needs an update →“The result is that a framework intended to insulate juries from undue influence can instead create chaos: news providers standing well back or barging over the line depending on mercenary risk-benefit analyses, international publishers running pieces that would be slam-dunk breaches if they were British, and a tombola of prejudicial posts online from people who really ought to know better….The ironic result of all this is that irresponsible coverage is sometimes easier to bump into than the other kind.”Pew Research Center / Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy, & Gonzalo Rivero23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, Pew report finds →A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. For older content, this trend is even starker; 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later.Semafor / Max TaniAs clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple’s news app be a lifeline? →“The partnership also raises some of the questions publishers avoided during the peak social media era. It incentivizes users to subscribe to Apple News+ rather than to publications directly, likely cannibalizing some potential revenue. It’s driving editorial decisions, meaning publishers are once again changing their content strategy to placate a platform. And of course the company could wake up one day and decide, like Facebook, that it no longer really wants to be in the news business, leaving news publishers stranded.”The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin and Katie RobertsonFraud trial to begin for Ozy founder Carlos Watson →“The jury trial of Carlos Watson, who is charged with trying to defraud investors in the digital media start-up he co-founded, Ozy Media, is scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection in federal court in Brooklyn. Mr. Watson has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. If convicted, he could face up to 37 years in prison.”Vanity Fair / Charlotte KleinMeet “the Inspector General” of the New York Times newsroom →“Today the Times newsroom is a different place than it was 10 years ago…Management feels they have to provide more guidance across the board and take concerted moves to protect the institution. [Charlotte] Behrendt’s evolved role seems to be one such mechanism. As one former senior editor put it, ‘The fact that she has internal investigations in her title is a character change of astonishing order.'”The Verge / Mia SatoUSA Today is adding AI-generated summaries to the top of its articles →“The AI feature, labeled ‘key points’ on stories, uses automated technology to create summaries that appear below a headline. The bottom of articles includes a disclaimer, reading, ‘The Key Points at the top of this article were created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reviewed by a journalist before publication. No other parts of the article were generated using AI.'”

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