Before you realise it’s Friday and a whole week of publishing about fact checking is over. The first year journalism students in Utrecht were taught to work in a Content Management System, to phone journalists and sources to confront them with the facts from the articles, upload their post and multimedia onto the blog and interview guest speakers.

The week combined practical work, journalistic basics (fact checking) and multimedia blogging in one. Some of the findings are remarkable, like press releases that newspapers just copy and paste without checking  (also copying mistakes) and publishing graphics about the US elections with the wrong amount and numbers.

There are also newspaper articles with only one source (while we all know that one source equals no source) and articles were the opinion of the journalist is difficult to distinguish from the facts.

Most students are positive, giving responses like

“I couldn’t believe that we were able to find so many mistakes and write so many blog posts in just one week”

to

“I’m glad that I now understand how a CMS works, I can now post my own blog and that is good to know”

It was a great pleasure to work with about 25 enthusiastic, clever, first year Journalism students and to be able to pass on my practical knowledge and examples. I would also like to thank our guest speakers Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck who were all able to keep the students motivated and answered all their questions patiently.

These practical lectures can easily be adapted into a Master Class in journalism or be part of a media training for beginning journalists. If you need more information you can always e-mail Elvira.

This upcoming week the first-year students of the School for Journalism in Utrecht, The Netherlands, will experience their first Orientation Week.  The students have the whole week to get familiar with a certain journalistic medium, in this case new media.

We have organised a week around the theme ‘Fact Checking’, an important topic to deal with in a journalism department. During the week all students will research Dutch regional and national newspapers and check the facts. Guest lectures by Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck will give the students examples from ‘the real world’.

After one week of research the students will publish the results on our new weblog, factchecking.nl