This photo supposedly shows a smiling Ukrainian eating the arm of a dead Russian. It was published on the Russian news site rusvesna.su on June 6 and has been spreading on social media ever since. In reality, the photo is actually a behind-the-scene’s shot from the making of a 2008 Russian sci-fi movie, “We’re from the future”.

It took just a day for the Ukrainian site stopfake.org to published details of the real origin of the photo – one of hundreds of fake reports that the website has debunked since it started in March 2014.

read more

Critics of using social media to crowdsource news argue that people on the street aren’t objective and that their impressions of an event can’t be trusted. But in this guest blog post for onMedia, journalist Ranty Islam argues crowdsourcing is a key journalism tool that stems from a tradition older than the media itself – the bustling marketplaces and squares that have been used for information exchange since time immemorial.

read more

Thanks to new technologies, journalists have information coming at them from all directions. They just have to turn on their phones or computers to find potential stories in calls, texts, emails and updates from all sorts of social media. This is fantastic for journalists, of course. But it does have a downside – journalists, especially news reporters, need to think carefully about how to separate fact from rumour and when to run with a story. Journalist Martin Vogl spent several years working in Africa for international broadcasters and is also a DW Akademie trainer. He has the following advice.

read more

Be it the death of Osama bin Laden, the emergency landing of a plane on the Hudson River or armed conflict in Syria, photos and videos made by eye witnesses usually reach the public as initial evidence through breaking news. Today, media organizations are virtually flooded with digital content from all over the world which makes it even more important to pay attention to the sources of information. That is why large media organizations have set up special research teams to verify the content from social networks. Although most of them follow the same rules, it is worthwhile to compare the separate approaches. Konrad Weber shows how renowned international media outlets such as ARD, BBC, CNN and others check the content coming from social media.

read more