| Description |
THE NEWS HOUR WITH JIM LEHRER is a highly respected, daily news series that airs on PBS. Online NewsHour is the program’s digital component and its long-time editor-in-chief is Lee Banville. In early 2008, Banville and the AFI Digital Content Lab hatched an ambitious plan to create a fact-check website that focused on statements made during the build-up to the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. While there are other user-generated news and even fact-checking websites available, none were tied to a TV news brand as venerated as NewsHour’s and few encouraged citizens to do their own research. Furthermore, Banville intended to use the AFI DCL –produced site as a story source, pulling the most compelling Items being debated on the website and elevating them to the daily TV show. Online NewsHour also hoped to use THE FACT PROJECT as a platform to attract younger audiences to the NEWSHOUR brand online and on TV, while at the same time providing tools and resources for fact-checking political claims and overall making the news reporting process less mysterious and more accessible.
The team developed a fully working website devoted to fact checking and that addressed all these issues. When a user first comes to THE FACT PROJECT homepage, they are greeted by an interactive tutorial. This serves as an introduction to the tenets of editorial research and encourages site visitors to register as fact checkers.
A registered site visitor could choose to submit an Item that they believe requires supporting evidence in the form of video, photos or links to articles or blogs. An ‘Item’ could be as varied as a story written by a journalist, an audio clip from a town hall stump speech, an excerpt from a blog or the scan of a flier left on a windshield at the grocery store. They didn’t want to limit THE FACT PROJECT’s ability to cover as many questionable statements as possible, in whatever format. Each Item shows the user who submitted it originally, the date and time the Item was created and any tags associated with it.
Once the Item has been submitted, other users may react in one of two ways. The first is a general comment in which users vent and share opinions. The second type of reaction is geared toward building a community whose goal is to report, research, and offer additional resources that contribute to the fact checking of that Item. An individual Fact Check also has a Factometer graphic with five states: From left, false(F), more false than true(MF), unconfirmed(U), more true than false(MT) and true(T). In the end, the state of an individual Item is the collaborative product of the community who submitted Fact Checks for that Item. The team thought it was important to include a quick visual indicator for each Item that was submitted, in case someone didn’t have time to read every single piece of supporting evidence.
Other key site elements include Registration & Login, Top Facts Under Review, Campaign Ad Watch, Fact Project Desk, Feeds, E-mail Alerts and a Tag Cloud that features the most popular fact checks on the site. On the back end, a dashboard provides registered users with access to all Items they’ve created, as well as all Fact Checks they have submitted to other’s Items. This section also has standard My Account and Help areas. |
| Mentors |
ABC Digital Media: Sanjit Das
…and company: Ryan R. Rohatgi, Catherine Van Den Ostende, La Mer Walker
GHC Media Partners: Robert A. Cooper
Herbalife International: Tricia Nelson
MGM Studios: Yaoshiang Ho
Online NewsHour: Lee Banville, Katie Kleinman, Richard Vary
PBS Interactive: Laura Hertzfeld
The1stMovement: Ming Chan, Bryan Encina
Tiny Pictures, Inc.: Francis Li
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