In this demo-phase of the NPP we focused on photojournalism and the provenance of images. Engineers at IBM used Hyperledger Fabric on the backend to load (via an API) photographic metadata from two publishers and created a social media website to showcase the capability of the blockchain solution. The R&D team worked with IBM over the summer to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) that demonstrates how provenance information on photos could be shown on a social media feed: clickably, unintrusively, but conspicuously. To achieve this role, decentralized authentication would be supported by a private blockchain network that could store and validate contextual information of news stories.
In short, the project has aimed to make the “supply chain” of journalism transparent and navigable for end users. The core idea behind the project was that in order to enhance audience trust, we would need platforms and platform applications that would help readers and social media users navigate the tangled landscape of articles, photos, and other forms of media, and allow them to see where those media come from and how they come about. The thinking behind the project goes like this: if readers and viewers can peek behind the curtains of journalistic production, they would be more trustful of what they read and hear. The News Provenance Project – Authenticating photos in journalism Not only does it tell the reader when the photo was taken and which organization verified it, but expanding the icon provides a detailed history of the image’s circulation on the internet. If misinformation scales through networks, authentication must scale through networks too.Ī mockup of the NPP icon that would appear according to the project’s Proof of Concept.
And so it may seem that the solution to decentralized misinformation might come in the form of decentralized authentication or verification. Today misinformation has more subtle forms and sources: opinion sites disguised as news services, comment bots, social media pages. Propaganda used to come from identifiable sources, such as states’ communications departments or corporations’ press offices. Decentralization also permeates tech, media, finance, and just about any industry remotely capable of extracting abstract value from its assets (money, information, licensing, and so on).Īs a result, misinformation is decentralized, too. Today, stories and articles that appear to be legitime can come from anywhere–news, whether fake or real, has become decentralized. Misinformation– however you may want to define it–signifies a broad range of phenomena that includes deceptive political campaigns on social media, false information masked as legitimate news stories, or the general slipping-away of legacy news organizations’ gatekeeping role. Introduction: Decentralized misinformation, decentralized authenticationįighting misinformation has become a household chore for news organizations. His research centers on data-driven tools used in newsrooms.) (Bernat Ivancsics is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Communications program at the Columbia Journalism School.
#NYTIMES NEWS PROVENANCE PROJECT SOFTWARE#
He has worked as a software developer in the past and is now focusing on computational stories and building tools for the newsroom.) (Bhaskar Ghosh is a second-year dual degree student in Journalism and Computer Science at Columbia University. Bhaskar Ghosh and Bernat Ivancsics, Brown Institute Fellows who worked on the project over the summer, give their insights. provenance) of journalistic content clearer to news audiences. The project is an attempt to curb the growing threat of misinformation by making the sources and origin (i.e. Yesterday, The New York Times’ R&D team, in collaboration with IBM Garage, released the initial findings of The News Provenance Project (NPP), which began in July.
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