New initiatives around journalism
Two new initiatives around journalism on the fediverse popped up this week. The journalism-focused server Newsie.social launched the verifiedjournalist.org project. It aims to provide an extra level of verification and credibility for journalism. Federated.press, another journalism-themed server, la
Two new initiatives around journalism on the fediverse popped up this week. The journalism-focused server Newsie.social launched the verifiedjournalist.org project. It aims to provide an extra level of verification and credibility for journalism. Federated.press, another journalism-themed server, launched a new pilot project to fact check specific posts.
Verified journalism
Newsie.social is a server that focuses on journalism, news and current events. It hosts a significant number of journalists, even though the server is open for everyone to join. The admin Jeff Brown is fairly involved with journalistic projects, such as hosting a journalism code of conduct on Fourth Estate. The new project that launched this week is Verifiedjournalist.org, a tool that helps with both discovery and verification of journalists.
VerifiedJournalists.org is a database of public journalists account on the fediverse, organised per category, that people can browse and follow. It is based on an earlier lists of journalists that people could sign up for, and has now transformed into a fully functional database.
The new addition to this project is the ability of the journalist to get a verified status. Verified accounts have linked their Mastodon account to the service, and provided some account details to the service. The screenshot below shows the details that I have provided in order to get my account verified with the service:
Verifiedjournalist.org also manually verifies the account, just providing the account details and linking your account is not enough. This human verification increases the authenticity of the verification status. The website explains that part of the criteria is that a profile must be authentic. It is hard to truly know with a 100% guarantee that a new journalist profile is indeed authentic, and it is unclear how the project actually checks for authenticity.
With discoverability being a major pain point for a lot of people in the fediverse, the ability to help find journalists can be a major boon. It is a great resource to point new accounts towards to help find valuable accounts to follow.
The project has a few strong posts. Any account can link their Mastodon account to the service, and browse the list for journalists they want to follow. Doing so allows you to click the follow button directly from the website, so you do not have to find the journalist again in another tab. It also shows a preview of the timeline of the account. This immediately gives a good indication of how active the account is, how often they post, and what type of content they post.
Fact checking with News Detective
Federated.press is another news and journalism themed server, that also launched a new project this week; an integration with news-detective, a fact checking initiative. With the integration, you can request a fact check on posts that are made on the federated.press server. In the current version, only accounts who are registered on the server can request such a fact check.
The result of the fact check gets added as a 'reality score' on a 1 to 5 scale to the post itself. The website of news-detective provides an example:
The project mentions that they are still in the process of hiring developers and potential co-founders. For now, it seems that the project is very early in the incubation process, and it will remain to be seen how it further develops.
