In English, there is a phrase “Seeing is believing.” In Chinese, people say “眼見為實(眼见为实) — To see is to believe.”
On the internet, this new expression, “有圖(图)有真相 — No photo, no proof,” is also very popular in the Chinese speaking communities.
In fact, many countries have very similar, or even identical, expressions. The idea seems universal. We tend to believe what we see with our own eyes.
That’s why photos and videos are an essential part of the news. Images show what it’s like to be at the scene.
Cameras serve as our eyes and ears. We feel like we understand the news better with visual information because, as people often say, a picture is worth a thousand words. …
[Video transcript]
When news editors and producers are making editorial judgments to decide which stories to allocate their resources, the news values are not the only factor.
They also try to strike a balance between what the audience wants to know and what it might need to know. …
The following introduction activities are designed to bring out the following talking points:
Activity idea 1:
[Transcript]
In print newspapers and magazines, we have what we call advertorials. They look and read like news articles but in fact, they are sponsored content.
In other words, someone paid to put the story into the newspaper, just like an advertisement, but it is presented in the form of an article.
The one on the screen is a scanned image of one such advertorial published in the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong.
And here’s the media company’s rate card which shows how much you need to pay to place an advertorial.
When you Google “advertorial examples,” you can easily find many examples of this practice. …
[Video Transcript]
The fundamental difference between news stories and other forms of storytelling is that news is factual — it should not be a result of fictional imagination, which is to say, all the information in a news story should come from somewhere outside of reporters’ brain.
So, where do journalists get information about things? There are many ways for news reporters to find story ideas, but one of the common ways is to start with a press release.
For example, here is a press release the University of Hong Kong gave to the members of the press in 2011. It basically tells that many international students were choosing our university and the number of overseas applications hit a record high. …
Establish how powerful the information we like, share, and produce on social media could be. You may like to show the following videos.
Social media pledge + self-reflective video monologue
Students should be able to:
Step 1: internet usage self-reporting survey
In this step, students are asked to log their internet usage every day for one week. They need to submit how many minutes they spend on what activities (you might need to show how to get the app usage and screen time data on different devices although most students know how to retrieve such information these days. …
A constant stream of fraudulent news stories in our daily media diet has given rise to troubling cultural trends and alarming political movements in recent years across the world.
False claims, deceptive factoids, exaggerations, propaganda, hoaxes, rumors, questionable advertising, radical extremism, and other types of misleading content, often called misinformation and disinformation, are now being masqueraded as journalism.
In today’s digital world, we are flooded with an abundance of all types of information. …
By Annie Lab team
We have created a Flipboard magazine to share our bookmarks of fact-checking stories related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
If you have any content that seems to have not yet been investigated by any. fact checker, please contact us so that our team can look into it.
Annie Lab newsroom is a fact-checking project at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong (HKU Journalism) in collaboration with ANNIE (Asian Network of News & Information Educators), a not-for-profit educational organization registered in Hong Kong (CR number 2890935).
In recent years, a constant stream of fraudulent news stories has given rise to troubling cultural trends and alarming political movements across the world.
False claims, misleading factoids, unsound exaggerations, propaganda, hoaxes, rumors, questionable advertising, radical extremism and other types of misinformation and disinformation are now being masqueraded and distributed as news.
In October 2019, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong (HKU Journalism) co-established a daily fact-checking newsroom in partnership with ANNIE (Asian Network of News & Information Educators), a not-for-profit organization focusing on news literacy education in Asia. …
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