‘Getting to the root of the “fake news” problem means fixing what’s broken about journalism itself’

The spread of misinformation online is a multi-faceted problem with many different sources, and that means that there’s no one solution to the “fake news” problem, Shan Wang writes. Summarizing the ideas to come out of this weekend’s MisinfoCon at Harvard University, Wang writes that the weekend was focused on fixing the things that are broken about journalism now. Some ideas to come out of the conference: Readers may be inclined to believe false stories because of a lack of legitimate news sources in their geographic area, a tool could be built to help advertisers block fake news sites better, and an “empathy accelerator” could help newsrooms facilitate conversations with groups who may not have interacted before. You can see all the presentations from the conference here.

+ The “fake news” frenzy is changing how corrections are perceived, Alexios Mantzarlis writes, and “‘Lol #fakenews’ cannot become a standard, reflexive reaction to media corrections” (Poynter)

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from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/2maopGp