From data to the press: Data management for journalism and fact-Checking

Modern societies crucially rely on the availability of free media. While any citizen has today access to the necessary tools to publish content and debate, the best standards for reliable, verified reporting and for well-structured debates are still held by professional journalists. Historically confined to newsrooms and performed before publication, verification of claims (aka fact-checking) has now become a very visible part of journalists’ activity; the importance of some topics under discussion (e.g., large-scale pollution or the national economy) has also attracted fact-checkers outside the journalism industry, such as scientists, NGOs etc. In this talk, I will outline a vision of Journalistic Dataspaces, as an environment and set of tools that should support journalists and/or fact-checkers by means of digital content management. This draws upon the recent years of collaboration with journalists from French media, notably Le Monde’s fact-checking team”Les Décodeurs” and Ouest France, a large regional newspaper, as well as many academic colleagues. I will highlight the common needs of fact-checking and modern (”data”) journalism, show how existing tools from the database, information retrieval, knowledge representation and natural language processing can help realize this vision. I will also discuss the main technical and organizational challenges toward realizing this vision. Most of this work is part of the [ http://contentcheck.inria.fr/ — ANR ContentCheck project ].