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Nytimes news provenance project11/25/2023 ![]() So how are they gonna do this? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with “b” and ends in “lockchain.”Īll hype aside, blockchain offers mechanisms for sharing information between entities in ways we think are essential for establishing and maintaining provenance of digital files. Maybe it could even record the path the image took in the editing process - any brightening, sharpening, cropping, or other Photoshoppy changes. ![]() It might let you look at metadata - either created through software at the time a photo was taken or added by a photo editor down the line - that tells you about its origins. So when you see a photo on Facebook or Twitter that claims to be from The New York Times and seems to show some sort of outrageous activity - say, a politician engaged in some sort of illegal or improper behavior - a tool made by the News Provenance Project might be able to let you check that the photo really is a Times photo. How might access to photo metadata change how audiences perceive photos that don’t have metadata?.How helpful might a symbol or watermark be in establishing credibility?.What kinds of metadata - for example, the time and place the photo was captured, the original publisher and caption, the photo’s revision history- might be important to include or prioritize?.How much information might be helpful or necessary in sourcing a photo shared outside of its published context?.Could information about a photo’s digital history help people better understand the way it is produced and published?.We’ll test the effectiveness of that proof of concept to find out whether access to that information helps audiences better understand the veracity of professionally produced photojournalism. To that end, we are approaching this task with a hypothesis: that adding context to images might have a positive or clarifying effect on the wide ecosystem of information published to the web.Īround that hypothesis, we are conducting user research, which we’ll use as the basis for a proof of concept. Because photos can be easily manipulated - and then circulate widely through digital spaces with few brakes applied from social platforms, messaging apps or search engines - we are aiming to learn what happens when we give audiences better insight about the information associated with a news photo published online. Our first project is focused on photojournalism. How should news organizations respond to this crisis? In addition to false statements published as fact in text and photos that have been manipulated or republished out of context, instances of manipulated video are now on the rise. In a time of heightened political polarization and widespread social media use, the prevalence of misinformation online is a persistent problem, with increasingly serious effects on elections and the stability of governments around the world. It’s in that spirit that The New York Times’ R&D group has launched The News Provenance Project, which aims to establish “a set of signals that can travel with published media anywhere that material is displayed: on social media, in group chats, in search results and emails, and so on” in order that an end user could verify its, well, provenance. Around a quarter of Americans surveyed aren’t aware of the difference between a reporter and a columnist, or between a news story and a press release.īut one thing that both journalists and their audiences tend to agree on is that there’d be more trust in the whole process if news organizations let readers know more about the sourcing and evidence they cite in stories. To take one example: Only 58 percent think that, when reporters use anonymous sources, they actually know who the source is most of the rest think the journalists themselves have no idea who they’re talking to. People - and by people I mean non-journalists here, normals - have some pretty wild misconceptions about how reporters and editors do their work.
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