SJMC Weekly Announcements

According to a recent Knight Foundation study, 74% of Americans are very concerned about the spread of misinformation on the internet, including strong majorities of both Democrats (84%) and Republicans (65%). To help address these concerns, a group of researchers has recently received a $5 million Phase II Convergence Accelerator cooperative agreement award from the National Science Foundation. The group plans to continue its development of Course Correct, a tool designed to help journalists identify and combat misinformation online.

Researchers at UW-Madison include SJMC's Dhavan Shah, Mike Wagner, Sijia Yang and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor William Sethares. They will work with several collaborators from other institutions, including Washington State University Associate Professor Porismita Borah, Georgetown University Associate Professor Leticia Bode, Georgia Tech Associate Professor Munmun De Choudhury adn Assistant Professor Srijan Kumar, University of Minnesota Associate Professor Emily Vraga, and Founder and CEO of Anchor Change Katie Harbath. Borah, Bode, Vraga and Harbath are all UW-Madison SJMC alums. Read more about the project.

Sue Robinson has just finished up some applied research with her research team (Josh Darr, a political scientist at LSU, and a media studies grad student named Patrick Johnson at U of Iowa) in conjunction with the newsroom training program called Trusting News. Check out these two Medium posts about what they found related to how journalists can help reduce polarization through careful language selection via an anti-polarization checklist and community conversations with disengaged constituents that have resulted in a couple guides for newsrooms. Read the guide for building trust with diverse audiences. Read the guide for depolarizing local news coverage.