The serendipity of the St. Petersburg trip
After a week in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the Poynter Institute and the Tampa Bay Times, sophomore Jaden Amos has finally found her career path.
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news — even as college sophomores, student journalists are already facing and working through challenges coming from a fast-changing media environment.
“I think it’s really important to understand what fake news actually means,” sophomore Ella Hunt said. “Journalists aren’t out to get people.”
The morning sessions at the Poynter Institute focused on just that.
Allison Graves, a multimedia reporter for Poynter’s digital literacy MediaWise project, emphasized the importance of questioning the truth of everything on the internet — from the source’s URL to other content on the website to increased paid content.
“I now know to do what’s called lateral reading by viewing content from other sources to verify the information,” journalism student Joe Schroeder said.
Poynter targets its MediaWise training to teenagers. Its goal is to reach 1 million teens through online programming from YouTube’s Crash Course, in-person workshops such as the one given to Ernie Pyle Scholars and Stanford-developed curriculum in classrooms.
In the second session, Daniel Funke, a fact-checking reporter for Poynter, made the case to retire the use of the politically charged term, “fake news.”
The term has too much baggage, he said, and there are more accurate terms to describe what obstacles journalists face between them and the truth.
These terms include:
- Misinformation: false connections between things or misleading content
- Disinformation: false claims, manipulated content or fabricated statements
- Mal-information: certain leaked information, harassment or hate speech
Fact-checking, researching sources in-depth and looking at what other, reliable sources have to say about a given topic all lead students to be better reporters.
“You see outrageous ‘fake news’ posts every day. What you don’t realize, however, is how cleverly veiled misinformation can be,” Lexi Haskell said. “It’s so important to have a critical eye when consuming media.”
The two sessions went hand-in-hand. Vigilant readers question sources more closely, question the information given to them and always seek secondary verification.