Recap: News Impact Summit, Hamburg
,On 31 March 2015 about 140 journalists and media folks made their way to Hamburg, Germany, to attend the News Impact Summit, part of a series of media innovation events organised by the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and Google News Lab. Those present discussed various aspects of verification, investigation, and digital ethics.On 31 March 2015 about 140 journalists and media folks made their way to Hamburg, Germany, to attend the News Impact Summit, part of a series of media innovation events organised by the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and Google News Lab. Those present discussed various aspects of verification, investigation, and digital ethics.
The conference brought together some of the leading figures from the UGC (user-generated content) verification sphere, among them Craig Silverman of Emergent, Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Jenni Sargent of Eyewitness Media Hub, Fergus Bell of SAM, Hauke Janssen of Der Spiegel and Michael Wegener of ARD News, to name but a few.
Offical partner and representing
DW Innovation was involved in the conference through its REVEAL project. Project members Jochen Spangenberg and Ruben Bouwmeester participated in the event as representatives for REVEAL, one of the official partners of the summit.
In the morning, Jochen gave an ignite talk, presenting a brief overview on the state of affairs regarding the dealing with and verification of eyewitness media as the main focus of REVEAL. One of the conclusions he offered: While tools and algorithms can certainly help tremendously in the verification of user-generated content, there will always be a role to play for humans–mainly journalists–at least in the foreseeable future.
Following this and more keynote presentations were some hands-on workshops dealing with various aspects of verification. Among them a session led by Nikos Sarris of ATC presenting first research outcomes of REVEAL. The session included the first public display of a verification prototype named Truthnest developped under the lead of ATC.
If you want to find out more about the Summit and verification of UGC, we highly recommend
- this detailed event summary produced by the European Journalism Centre.
- the day's round-up by Charlie Becket, Director of POLIS at the London School of Economics
Notes:
This article is an amended version of a contribution that first appeared on the REVEAL project website.
Image taken by @EJC
