Craig Silverman announced Tuesday that he’s joining the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University as a fellow.
Silverman, who is an adjunct faculty member for the Poynter Institute, will continue writing for Poynter, where he has written about debunking in his Regret the Error blog, which he brought to Poynter in 2011.
During his fellowship, Silverman wrote, he’ll create a database of rumors in the press.
I’m joining to conduct research into how news organizations deal with rumors and unconfirmed information, and to identify best practices for how journalists can debunk misinformation.
The result will be a research paper published in 2015, which will be available for free online. I will also be a launching a public-facing website where anyone can view the data being collected for the project.
He’ll talk more about the project at the Online News Association conference in Chicago later this month, Silverman wrote.
“…This project enables me to conduct quantitative research to learn more about how rumors are being treated by news orgs, and what can be done to better debunk false information in a networked world.”
Here are some News University courses available from Silverman:
— Getting It Right: Accuracy and Verification in the Digital Age
— Online and Social Media Corrections: When, Why and How
— Don’t Get Fooled Again: Best Practices for Online Verification
