InformaCam App Will Help Verify Citizen Journalism Content

A supposedly real shot of Hurricane Sandy water. (Wikimedia Commons)

Many viral shots of the first 24 hours of Hurricane Sandy turned out to be fake.  Somehow we missed detecting that one right away.  Citizen journalism yields a lot of incredible stuff, but kinks still exist (only human, right?).  According to the Nieman Lab, the human rights organization Witness is creating an app that hopes to make it easier to nab the fake videos, photos, and audio people share from mobile devices.  The InformaCam app “would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.”

Journalists Worry About Publishing Too Much Information

(Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Jarvis tackles the question of how ethical and shrewd it is for the media to publish things like a map of gun permit applicants.  Some journalists, like David Carr and Jim Wilse (who Jarvis says is the “best American newspaper editor [he’s] ever worked with”), have felt uneasy about such releases.

Jarvis comes to a different conclusion: “It is not up to journalists to decide what gun permits are public information.  It’s up to us as citizens to decide that, as a matter of law.  If there is something wrong with that, then change the law.  If society is not comfortable with making that information public, then don’t try to make it somewhat public, public-with-effort…There’s no half-pregnant.  In the net age, there’s no slightly public.”

 

“There has never been a better time to be in journalism”

Newspapers are for the birds! (Flickr Creative Commons: Nationaal Archief)

Poynter chatted with Chris Seper, founder and CEO of MedCity Media, who says “there has never been a better time to be in journalism.”  Seper spent nearly a decade working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is now in its death throes.  “I think in the past we associated journalism jobs with big outlets that contained hundreds upon hundreds of jobs,” he said in the chat.  “And we associated them with traditional media outlets.  That’s not the case now.” 

But because of the rise of digital, he said, there are “more opportunities to publish than ever before. To start your own shops. To launch and serve readers in the ways they truly want to see themselves served.”

You can read the whole chat here.