Journalism is about far more than simply gathering information and passing it on. An essential part of the editorial process is to examine everything we are told to make sure it is factual, and then add context so that any facts that are uncovered are considered alongside existing knowledge.

The author skyfishgoo wrote in a piece about critical thinking that “science and journalism both seek to put facts in context so they become useful to others”. He goes on to say that “science dictates that when a claim is made it is subject to critical review”.

Giving content “a bit of a scrub”

Put simply, he says that all of us have a responsibility to give every new piece of information that comes our way “a bit of a scrub” before passing it on to others.

This is particularly important in terms of producing original journalism and then broadcasting or publishing that material and sharing it on social media.

Once a piece of journalism is in the public domain it will be referenced, quoted, and possibly plagiarised as it becomes part of the global conversation. If that piece of journalism is untrue, then lasting damage will have been done.

But let’s first agree what is meant by the word ‘fact’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a fact is something that is “known or proved to be true”. It is also “information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article”. In legal terms, a fact is “the truth about events as opposed to interpretation”.

And that last definition is interesting, because journalists ‘interpret’ events by adding context – but more on that later. For now, let’s refer to facts that have not yet been fully tested as ‘claims’.

Here are a few tests that should be applied to information that a journalist receives from someone who ‘claims’ that what they are passing on is factual.

The first three tests are about source verification and fact-checking, the fourth is about adding context.

1: Is the source credible?

• What do we know about the source?
• What is their motive for sharing the information?
• Could the source have an agenda about which we are not aware?

To Do: Research the background of the source, their connections, any previous record of sharing information.

2: Has it happened?

• Could there be a simple explanation?
• Has your source been misled? If so, by whom?
• Is there a history of such an event taking place?

To Do: Research the chronology of events. Check your own news organisations archive. Search the web.

3: Where is the evidence?

• Is the information available elsewhere?
• What is the evidence to support the claim?
• Has that evidence been tested?

To Do: Seek out a second, independent and trusted source.

4: What is the context?

• What are the implications if the claims are true?
• How many people are affected and how?
• Gather data and statistics for comparison purposes.

To Do: Paint the bigger picture, understand the importance of the event in relation to other news stories.

Those of you who are new to journalism might want to print out the following checklist and put it on the wall in your newsroom as a reminder.

If the results of your research make you feel uneasy you might want to drop the story. However, even a false claim, presented as fact, but, on investigation, found to be untrue, could still be a story. It could point to a political, commercial, or social conflict that might require investigation.

Never rule out a possible news story because the initial evidence presented proves to be shaky.

Now let’s look at point four ‘the context’ more closely.

Adding context

One dictionary definition of ‘context’ is: “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.”

That word, ‘understood’, is important.

The role of a journalist is to enhance understanding. We do that by surrounding proven facts with data, statistics, history, and circumstances that, together, help paint a fuller picture of what has happened.

Think of it this way.

Imagine you are at home watching a series on TV. It’s the final episode of six. Just as the programme is reaching the conclusion there is a knock at the door. It’s a friend you haven’t seen for some time. You welcome them in.

As they walk through the door there is a scream from the lounge. One of the characters in the TV series has discovered the gruesome remains of a body. Your guest is shocked, but fascinated.

You offer to turn the TV off so you can chat, but they are so intrigued by what they saw on the screen that they ask you whether they could watch the programme with you, particularly as it’s reaching its conclusion. They want to know what happens next.

So you pause the programme, put the kettle on, make a cup of tea, and tell your guest about what has happened so far.

You explain who the characters are, what has taken place in previous episodes, how the situation has developed, the relationships between the characters, what clues you have picked up along the way, and how the plot has thickened to reach the point where your guest heard the scream.

And explaining the background proves to be important because your friend thought you must be watching a murder mystery, when, in fact, the series you were watching was a documentary about archeology. The scream was from an archeologist who had unexpectedly found mummified remains. It was not a modern-day crime thriller.

Now your guest has the context, so you can watch the end of the final episode together, with your guest informed about the background to the story and better able to understand events.

The same is true with journalism.

A colleague who was working as an intake editor on a news desk remembers receiving a call from an off-duty reporter who had just passed an overturned red double decker bus on  a London street. People were wandering around with blood pouring from wounds. Two camera crews were mobilised, but before they’d even left the building the reporter discovered that it was a film crew making a movie. The story had changed once the reporter had checked his facts and explored the context.

I made a similar mistake when reporting on a fire at an inner city block of flats in Liverpool. I reported live into the 4pm news bulletin saying that residents were trying to salvage what they could from their burning homes. I was wrong. Had I checked my facts, not made assumptions, and taken time to establish the context of events I would have discovered that I was witnessing rioting and looting. You can read about that experience and the lessons learnt here.

The challenge all journalists face is not just to report the news but to also set out the background to an event as well as all related events in order to help the audience understand the elements of a story which they might otherwise find hard to comprehend – or even reach the wrong conclusion.

Perhaps it involves researching and setting out the chronology of events that have led to the current breaking news story. These can be presented as related stories.

You might need to research the backgrounds of the characters involved as you look for any social connections to anyone else involved. These can be presented as profiles.

Essentially, what you are doing is gathering as much information as possible in order to put together the most detailed, in-depth, and informative account of what has happened.

All this illustrates that journalism helps people make sense of the world – not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening. Stories that raise questions without even attempting to address those questions are weak stories.

• A bridge has collapsed. Why?
• A racing driver stops his car while leading the race. Why?
• A politician resigns. Why?

A news story without context can never be completely understood. A news source that is not verified can never be completely trusted. A claim, left unchecked, might not necessarily be a fact. And a news story without fact-checking and context could add more to the cacophony of confusion than to the enhancement of understanding.

If you found this interesting and, perhaps, helpful, you might want to check our other, related training modules.

Accuracy in journalism
The basics of fact-checking
How to identify and deal with fake news
Dealing with disinformation and misinformation
Unconscious bias and its impact on journalism

The post Fact-checking and adding context first appeared on Media Helping Media.

Treating sources with respect

Producing a piece of original journalism involves uncovering facts that, had it not been for you, would have remained hidden.

Your work will, however, probably include material that was already in the public domain; only your original idea and the final revelation might be new.

Journalists regularly have to refer to material created by others in the course of compiling a report.

Sometimes we get an idea for a follow up piece having seen an item on the TV news, heard something on the radio, spotted an interesting line in a newspaper, or been alerted to an event via social media.

In such cases, the original stimulation for following up a story comes from another source, which means that the story has not been created solely through our own original investigations, contacts, or research.

That doesn’t mean that the follow up piece you plan to write will be any less important; many great stories can be developed by reading what others have covered and finding a unique angle that has previously been missed.

We then embark on creating a new piece of content exploring the angle we want to focus.

That will become a piece of original journalism that will, hopefully, enhance the audience understanding of the issue being covered in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Original, copied, reworked

In another module on this site ‘Strategic forward planning for media organisations’ we looked at some of the sources of news available to media organisations, and underlined how it’s important to create original journalism.

We expanded on that theme in another module ‘Establishing a market differential with original journalism’ where we looked at how journalists can produce more than 10 original stories a week by investigating the issues that are of most concern to their own target audience.

But what should we do when we are following up stories created by others? What is the correct level of attribution? And how much of the original content should we use when mentioning the article to which we are referring?

These were some of the questions mailed to this site by a specialist writer asking advice on the best way to reference the work of others.

His skill is spotting angles in news stories and then producing detailed in-depth reports.

But he was unsure how to do so in a way that respects the original content, offers proper attribution, and avoids any suggestion of plagiarism.

Attribution for news sources

My own rule would be to use as little third-party material as possible.

Perhaps just refer to the headline and then sum up the gist of the article in one sentence, offering attribution and links where appropriate.

I would never copy any of the body text over to my own report unless I was offering a direct quote about what had been said.

Let’s look at how to follow up an angle to a story.

Say, for example, that there has been a fire at a clothing factory in which 350 people died.

The local newspaper claims the factory was a so-called ‘sweat shop’.

The reporter who wrote the piece had quotes from surviving workers that suggested there were inadequate employee safety regulations in force.

The newspaper reported eyewitness accounts that claimed that the factory floor was overcrowded, that emergency exits had been blocked with boxes of stock, and that the room was locked from the outside.

They claimed there was no health and safety training, and that many of the workers were non-registered and didn’t belong to trade unions.

There was no comment from the factory owners.

Let’s imagine you are an industrial correspondent who specialises in workplace safety and employer/employee relations. You read the line about safety and decide you would like to follow up the story.

You might feel compelled to write a headline ‘How safe is the clothing industry?’ in which you explore the issue and, in your piece, make reference to the original story that prompted you to investigate.

You might decide to write something like this:

“The Smallville Examiner’s report into the fire in a clothing factory that resulted in 350 deaths claimed that overcrowding and blocked emergency exits were part responsible for the high death toll.”

But is that safe?

The Smallville Examiner had included the name of the factory. They claimed to have spoken to the owner who, they reported, had said “no comment” when asked about safety conditions.

You haven’t spoken to the owner. So can you report the allegations and the response? Well of course you can, but is it safe to do so? Probably not.

The owner might be taking legal action against The Smallville Examiner. He or she might take legal action against you, too.

So, unless you have the time and resources to interview the owner, you had probably better keep it simple. Perhaps you would write something like this:

“Following the fire at a local clothing factory, which claimed the lives of 350 workers and was first reported in The Smallville Examiner (link to the report), we look at health and safety provision in the clothing industry and ask whether safety measures are tight enough.”

Here you have attributed the information to the source. You have briefly summarised what was reported, and you have provided a link. That’s probably all you should do at this point in terms of reference and attribution.

Now you can proceed with your piece.

In the case above you are simply reporting information which is already in the pubic domain.

You must not copy and paste another news organisation’s content, and you must not copy the text and then try to rework or paraphrase it in an attempt to make it look like your own.

You must respect the original source of the information and give full attribution.

Attribution to specific content

If you wanted to use a specific line from a quote in a piece on The Smallville Examiner you would have to go one step further.

If human rights activist and photojournalist, Floyd Boyd, speaking to The Smallville Examiner, was reported as saying that “while sifting through the charred remains of the factory I came across boxes of labels from well-known Western clothing outlets which showed they were benefitting from illegal working conditions”, you would need to do the following.

It would probably not be wise to write:

“The Smallville Examiner also carried an interview with a photojournalist who claimed to have seen ‘boxes of labels from well-known Western clothing outlets’ among the ‘charred remains’ of the factory.”

First of all it might not be true, secondly, those being accused might be preparing a fairly robust legal defence of the accusations.

What you could do is to try to contact Floyd Boyd to see whether he would confirm what he had said to The Smallville Examiner and expand on the point. He might even show you some of the pictures he took.

Once you have made contact, you could build on that interview and, gradually, make the story your own to the point that you could eventually drop any quotes from The Smallville Examiner and provide limited attribution, perhaps in the form of “in an issue first reported by The Smallville Examiner”.

Curation of content

Perhaps you want to do a form of ‘media review’ about an issue where you scour the web for information about a development.

You would need to make it clear at the beginning of your piece that it was a trawl of the most current references. So you would need to say something like:

• “Al Jazeera reports the story as [their headline goes here] in which they claim that [here you could paraphrase their main point and provide a link].”
• “Taking another view, The BBC claims that [their headline goes here] and they expand on the point to say [here you paraphrase the BBC line]” … and so on.

Tools for monitoring plagiarism

Plagiarism is rife. Many journalists just copy and paste. In some countries they genuinely seem to believe that copyright means they have a right to copy.

There are tools – many of them free – which help content producers check on plagiarism. Just search the web for the term ‘free plagiarism checker’ to see what’s available.

Some of these tools can actually tell how much of a piece of text has been reworked from the original and show percentage scores.

Some senior editors and sub editors working for major news sites actually copy and paste chunks of suspicious text into plagiarism checkers to make sure that the content they are being asked to approve is legitimate.

Social media

Of course social media turns all this on its head. Many rules are broken because:

1. often, those using social media are not journalists and don’t live by the rules, and
2. the big news organisations are unlikely to chase after a blogger or someone posting on Facebook or Twitter because it’s probably not worth it.

But that means that those who attribute content to “being discussed on social media” have the extra burden of checking where the original source material came from, and how far down the information food chain attribution applies.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, it’s far better to simply a) refer to sources, b) use extremely limited material in that reference, c) provide a link to the original material, and d) use as many qualifying words as you can without it looking silly – such as ‘according to’, ‘claims that’, ‘is reporting that’ etc.

Always try to make the story your own by finding your own sources revealing unknown facts – or interview those referred to in the original piece in order to find new angles on which to build your piece.

Most media organisations have the two independent sources rule. Even then, they will provide attribution to be on the safe side.

Does and don’ts

• Always check with your own senior editors and legal team to ensure you understand what your media organisation’s policy of attribution and referencing is.
• Never copy and paste the work of others.
• Always provide attribution.
• Never reversion or rework content to try to pass it off as your own.
• Always double-check facts, sources, quotes, places, times, dates etc
• Never accept what is written by others as fact.
• Always be honest about where you have found information.

This training module was written following an approach from a user of Media Helping Media for guidance on the issues covered. Please don’t apply any of the suggestions without first consulting your news organisation’s senior editorial staff.

Related training modules

Establishing a market differential with original journalism

Strategic forward planning for media organisations

The post Referencing, attribution and plagiarism first appeared on Media Helping Media.

This module was written for trainee journalists in Zimbabwe who were keen to learn how to produce in-depth video reports about life in their remote rural communities. 

Adding validity and context to news

Every news story needs at least one news source. This is where we get the information that creates the line or angle we decide to follow up.

Most news stories start with one source. That’s fine. The job of the journalist is to verify the information shared and then find at least one other source that can confirm what we have been told, or who can refute any claims made.

Typically, for a piece of information to be accepted as a fact, a journalist will require confirmation from two independent sources.

Our first source might be the publication of a document. It could be a person who has been involved in an incident or a witness to that incident.

It could be the publication of information through a news release. It could be something we have read in a newspaper, heard on the radio, seen on TV, or picked up on social media.

There are many forms of news sources. But if we have just one, we don’t really have a solid and reliable news story.

Most stories need a second, independent source

The challenge for all journalists putting together a news story is finding the second source.

For more complex, in-depth pieces, we often require a third and fourth news source, with each offering deeper insight about the issue being covered.

Let’s look at an example.

We hear of flooding in a village on the outskirts of Gweru, Zimbabwe. A local reporter goes to the scene.

They talk to Grace, a mother of four, who is found sitting outside the flooded remains of her home.

Grace talks first-hand about what happened overnight. She tells us that it is the third season running that her home has been washed away. And she claims the local authority has failed to take preventive action following the previous incidents.

Grace also claims that local residents fear a cholera outbreak because the flooding has caused raw human sewage to mix with the village’s water supply.

Clearly, this is an important story that needs to be told. And Grace is making some strong points.

We know, from what we can see, that there has been some devastating flooding overnight. When Grace says her home has been washed away we can see the evidence to support that claim. We can also see children playing in the polluted water around the damaged homes.

It seems the elements of the story are all there. In this case we probably don’t need a second source to confirm the flooding happened, it’s fairly obvious. A second voice would be good, perhaps another resident who has been affected.

But we do need at least one more source to respond to some of the claims Grace has made.

What if people in authority won’t talk to us?

Has the local authority failed to take action following previous flooding? We need to talk to a local authority representative.

But what if they won’t talk to us? In that case we need to talk to at least one more local resident who can support the claim that the local authority has failed to take appropriate action.

We also need to inform the local authority that, if they are unwilling to talk to us for whatever reason, we will need to make that clear in our piece.

We can do this in several ways, but a simple line saying “We approached the local authority but nobody was available to comment” might work.

Then we need to consider Grace’s claim that local residents fear a cholera outbreak.

Do they? We need to talk to a few more to see if this is a genuine fear, and, if it is, why. It could be that there has been an outbreak in the past. We need this information. And we need someone to confirm it.

Ideally, we need to find a local doctor, health worker, or a spokesperson from a health NGO working in this field, who can talk about the risks.

For our script, we need to be careful to understand the difference between the two words ‘fear’ and ‘face’. Grace may ‘fear’ a cholera outbreak, but does the village ‘face’ one?

We can report the fact that people ‘fear’ an outbreak, but, until we have our second source verifying that ‘fear’ we can’t say the village ‘faces’ an outbreak.

In this case, our important second source could change the whole focus of the story from a human tragedy story about Grace having her home washed away, to a potentially more serious story about a village facing a cholera outbreak.

The second source, having confirmed that the health risk fear could become a reality, means that we now need to go back to the local authority with a second question.

The first was to ask them what they are doing about the flooding. The second is to ask what they are planning to do about the health risks (which we have now been able to confirm with the local doctor or the NGO).

Data and statistics

Sources can also take the form of data/statistics/numbers. In the example of the flooding in the village near Gweru, we need numbers and dates.

How many times has this area been flooded? How many homes were washed away last year? How many people contracted cholera? If the local authority won’t talk to us, we should approach the local MP. If s/he won’t talk to us, then a village elder. If they won’t talk to us we need to talk to the relevant health authority.

Put simply, a journalist has to accept that some sources will refuse to comment, but we must never take a refusal to comment as a means of killing a story. Some with vested interests will want that outcome. They will be hoping that by repeating “no comment’ we will go away and the story will be forgotten. We need to continue to look for those second and third sources to verify the information we are compiling.

Producing informative journalism

Numbers are important, too, for making sense of what we are being told by our first, single source.

For example, let’s take another story, this one about young people on the outskirts of Harare recycling metal from the city dump.

Our reporter goes along and sees people separating various metals, melting some over a fire, and turning out pots and pans from the recycled material.

The reporter is told that young people “make a living from the city dump”. But what does that mean?

Using numbers to understand what we see

We need numbers. Numbers provide context. Context answers the “so what?” question. Most news stories need to answer the “so what?” question.

How long does a pan take to make? How much do the pots and pans sell for? How many do they sell in a day? What can that amount of money buy? Can it provide a day’s shelter and food for one person?

We could simply report that young people are recycling metal from the city dump making pots and pans that they sell. That’s of interest. It’s a reflection of life. But, as far as journalism is concerned, it’s just touching on the real story. And our job, as journalists, is to dig a bit deeper to add context and meaning – in fact to add the “so what?” factor.

Once we have the numbers about how many pots are produced, what they sell for, and what that money can buy, the story takes on a new meaning.

Through asking these questions we find out that young people are perhaps earning a living through scrap, perhaps able to feed a family of four for a week with one day’s work.

Now we can honestly claim that young people “make a living from the city dump”.

Numbers, second sources, and added information provide the context that turns an observation into a piece of journalism.

Let’s always seek out the second source. Let’s decide that we will never allow a refusal to comment to be used to prevent us from finding an alternative second source, or worse still lead to us dropping the story. And let’s also commit to finding the numbers that add the essential context and answer the “so what?” question that we should always be aiming to answer.

The post News sources, numbers and the ‘so what’ factor first appeared on Media Helping Media.