New Media models: when BuzzFeed fact checks a Pulitzer-prize winner

Just two days ago, the Guardian and the Washington Post were awarded the prestigious Pulitzer prize for their work relaying Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. This is of course well deserved and a lot of us probably feel great that we can still count on independent press to deliver us serious, quality news.

Or can we?

I found it ironic that over the last few days, the very same Guardian also happened to be at the origin of a French-bashing, misinformed article about France allegedly banning work emails after 6pm. An article that went viral before being fact checked by BuzzFeed and corrected by the Guardian:

Seriously? A Pulitzer-prize winning news institution can be fact checked by a web site that didn’t exist 10 years ago and that earned its fame through animated gifs?

Yes.

For those of us interested in the future of online content, there are interesting take-aways here:

Investigative journalism isn’t dead; and it’s needed.

I don’t know about you but I’m grateful to the Guardian for the NSA revelations. Regardless of what will or should happen to surveillance in the future, I’m glad the debate was made public. Any democracy needs counterpowers to avoid becoming the “tyranny of the majority” as Tocqueville once observed.

Is that investigative journalism still the monopoly of traditional media outlets? Wikileaks clearly showed it wasn’t but it’s great to see old media at its best.

New media publishers are not just good at lol cats and viral videos: they can be reliable too.

If you still think BuzzFeed is that site your 15-year old nephew wastes his time on, think again. While the new media publishers which use a mix of contributions, aggregations and content curation are often more reactive than proactive, their model helps them debunk hoaxes, expose false rumors and fact check even the venerable news institutions.

No media’s always right.

I grew up in the last century where mass media was trying to convince us that if it was printed or - better yet - broadcasted on TV, it was real. Up to the point where manufacturers would print “seen on TV” on their products to make them more credible (if you’re under 25, please don’t laugh: I guarantee you it’s true however ridiculous it might sound). My parents’ generation valued knowledge: they learned long lists of historical dates, chemical elements or state capitals. Today, knowledge is abundant - always a few clicks away through Google or Wikipedia. But critical thinking is probably one of the most needed skills for the coming generation as they will always be receiving a mix of hoaxes, fakes and real information - all of that from their Facebook and Twitter feeds or… from their grandparents (Sorry Mom, the Bill Cosby email you received and forwarded to all your address book is a hoax).

Long-tail topics are better off covered by those who know.

The reason I was amused and wanted to dig in the French email ban article is because I’m French. Not only that but I’m a French Entrepreneur. I’m based in San Francisco now but part of the Scoop.it team is in France and my previous startup Musiwave was started out of Paris where it still employs nearly 200 people - now as part of Microsoft.

In short, I’ve recruited a lot of people and unfortunately fired some. And yes, it’s possible (and in many cases probably easier than in some large American Sox-abiding companies where potential litigation risks make everything overwhelmingly complex - but I don’t even want to add to this debate and I also get why France gets some flak trying to navigate a fine line called work-life balance, n’est-ce pas?).

The point is that I knew this topic. So I was able to quickly search some other sources of information and quickly found the original agreement that started this whole thing. So was Marie Telling the BuzzFeed editor who's also French and probably found the news as odd as I did.

In case of doubt, look for the experts. Or if you're a media outlet, as Jeff Jarvis said: "cover what you do best; link to the rest".

We all have an opportunity and a role to play.

This is the most interesting to me and the reason we created Scoop.it as a free product anybody can use (while our business model is mainly driven by professionals and businesses).

We’re all experts at one thing. Or at least we can all become one - and with specialization of skills and knowledge, this probably happens faster than it used to.

So as a consequence of the above point and while investigative journalism is one thing, we all have a role to play to fact check, correct, edit and distribute information.

Not only this but as social networks like LinkedIn focus more and more on what we publish (rather than where we worked, what we did etc...), we are growingly being defined by the content we share online.

In short, we not only all can become media but we all have to.