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A new supertool fights fake images

A new supertool fights fake images, plus the Economist’s guide to Instagram and a new way to pay for journalism

• How can technology strengthen fact-checking? Jigsaw, a nonprofit division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, asks and then answers its own question with the announcement of Assembler, an experimental detection platform that aims to help fact checkers and journalists identify manipulated images.

The platform pulls together several existing technologies — for example, one that spots copy-and-pastes within images and another that detects image brightness manipulations — into one supertool. Right now, Jigsaw is working with a group of global newsrooms and fact-checkers to test Assembler’s viability in real situations. That means, unfortunately, it isn’t available for the rest of us yet.

This new tool can show you what journalists are writing about on a large scale. MuckRack Trends (log-in required) is a lot like Google Trends, which shows you what people are searching for on Google, but it’s specific to news articles. You can use it, for example, see how many news articles have been written about Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho over the past week (5,733, as I write this) and compare it to someone like, say, Martin Scorsese (5,612). There are SO MANY great uses for this. I wrote about some of them here.

The Economist makes charts … for Instagram. The visual social media platform is a natural home for informative and interesting infographics from one of the world’s most prestigious media brands. Charts like “Who is more liberal: Uncle Joe or Mayor Pete?” and “Interest in veganism is surging” perform well between the organization’s beautiful photos and illustrations. The Economist offers a few tips for others willing to try putting info on Insta, including: Keep colors consistent so that fast-scrollers know who they’re looking at, rethink charts and graphs to fit into a small space and cater to your audience, which is probably younger on Instagram.

If you need a new online publishing system, start here. Content management systems, or CMSs, are the engines that run our online journalism. A good engine works without you having to think much about it. A bad one — and I’m just making things up here — takes forever to load, formats text in unexplainable ways and occasionally deletes your stories outright. Together with News Catalyst, Poynter put together a guide on how to get a new CMS, along with a look at five of our favorite modern CMS choices and live demo opportunities for each.

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Here’s a map that shows stunning satellite images of locations across the globe. From school bus assembly plants (so much yellow) to airports (kind of meta!), from iron ore mine ponds (so much pink) to man-made islands that depict a pair of dolphins circling each other (‘nuff said), this map is fun to explore and might offer a story idea or two. 

Don’t call it a paywall. It’s more of a parking meter. A company called Transact has joined the fight to get people to pay for journalism. Transact’s transactions work similarly to micropayments, in which readers pay for articles from across the internet à la carte instead of a flat-rate subscription, except that users load up lumps of money at once and spend as they go. Transact calls it a “digital media debit card.” The Santa Barbara Independent, an alt-weekly newspaper in California, is one of the first to implement it. Transact joins a growing list of alternative payment schemes for journalism, including Blendle (which made a pivot away from micropayments not long ago) and Scroll (which kills ads and provides a better user experience).

Source: https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2020/a-new-supertool-fights-fake-images-plus-the-economists-guide-to-instagram-and-a-new-way-to-pay-for-journalism/

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