Reuters Digital Journalism

Thanks to social media, Everyone is a journalist.

Yesterday, June 30 was World Social Media Day. A good day to learn social media journalism? 🙂

The Reuters Digital Journalism course provides free online training for journalists to improve their digital newsgathering, verification and publishing skills, and to wellness and resilience resources.

Why I did the course

As the social media landscape has changed considerably in recent times, an understanding of how to produce and consume info responsibly, ethically and accurately is vital.

Notes

📌 Verify sources. Publication without verification puts your reputation at risk, can mislead your audience. Google Search vs Google Advanced Search (to find more targeted results) vs Google Trends (finding new story ideas or potential angles to existing, trending stories).

📌 Provide credits to sources. Identify the owner-> Explain how you will use their content-> Confirm how they would like to be credited-> Secure their agreement-> Save the permission record

📌 Better the Video Content. Get straight to the point. The first 10 seconds are the most important for any social video. This is where you will either capture a viewer’s attention or lose it.

📌 Ensure veracity of media content. There are many ways for people to manipulate media, especially images and video. Manipulated media types includes deepfakes, lost context, staged media, and CGI. Tools available to help with verification. Tip: In the Chrome browser, right click on an image and click Search Google for Image. This searches where else the image has appeared online before.

📌 Avoid amplifying false or misleading information. Read (full content) before you share and consider the source (do you trust the person who posted this?) If you determine a post is false, misleading, or otherwise harmful, you may want to report it under the platform’s policies, outlined in the next section.

📌 Optimize for Mobile. Research firms estimate 73% of mobile-only internet users by 2025. Nearly all social media users access platforms on their mobile devices and an increasing number of them access social media only on mobile. You should always consider how something will appear on mobile devices when posting on social media.

Other details

The course is Free. It’s self paced, text based learning with tests after each section. I skimmed through information that was not particularly relevant for me but found most of it interesting and the overarching theme valuable. I covered the 4 module course in ~2.5 hours.