Faster Fact Checking: Tools and Tips that Help the Media Break News Right on a Tight Deadline

NEW YORK, March 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- News breaks faster than ever thanks to social media.

Journalists now have the ability to track news in real-time as it unfolds, often via citizen journalists tweeting and recording on the scene.  The availability of up-to-the-second updates  does come at a cost: added pressure to report news more quickly than before, which can lead to missing details and/or inaccuracies -- sometimes with serious consequence.

As a result of this shift in sourcing and writing, journalists, bloggers, and newsrooms have begun to compile a toolbox of online resources and best practices that aid timely due diligence. Media Relations Manager Amanda Hicken explores 12 of these services and sites in  Beyond Bylines' four-part "Faster Fact Checking" series,

Sorting Through Statistics: Data journalism continues to gain traction as a way to provide context in a story; however, it can take hours to sort through vast amounts of facts and figures. Faster Fact Checking Part 1 features three tools that help with finding and analyzing data.

Making Sense of Social Media: Social media is an easy scapegoat for inaccurate reporting and the quick-fire sharing of misinformation. The three services featured in Fact Checking Part 2 focus on social media updates and user-generated content.

Crisis and Public Safety Reporting: Accuracy and speed become absolutely critical when public safety is in question. Part 3 of the series focuses on online platforms for verifying incoming reports during a crisis.

Verification Best Practices:  Fact checking tools can be helpful, but only if the user knows how to use them effectively and ethically. Beyond Bylines' series concludes with three websites that dig into best practices and case studies of verification successes and failures.

Read the full series on Beyond Bylines: http://bit.ly/fasterfactchecking

About PR Newswire

PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry 60 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content — from rich media to online video to multimedia — and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels. Combining the world's largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world's enterprises to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company.

Media Contacts:

Caitlin Carragee
Manager, Marketing Communications
201.360.6363  
[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140219/NY67823LOGO

SOURCE PR Newswire Association LLC