by Daniele Palumbo
On 13 November, the Online Journalism Association (ONA) organised WJChat, the first international web chat for journalists.
With the help of the hashtag #WJChat, Noga Tarnopolsky, GlobalPost’s senior correspondent for Israel/Palestine, and Ben Hartman, reporter for the Jerusalem Post, hosted and moderated the live Twitter conversation from the Jerusalem Press Club.
The first edition of #WJChat, which became a trending topic worldwide, produced 798 posts with a total of 5,077,191 impressions [readers] all over the world from journalists, professors and researchers.
With the help of the @WJChat team in the USA, it was possible for 814,636 total users to read and share opinions and content about sourcing and the ethical issue of journalists’ responsibilities in the digital age.
With ten questions, more than 170 journalists around the world had the chance to explain the importance of the role of sources in news gathering, especially for freelance journalists, and the problems that journalists face with the identity and reliability of the news obtained.
The chat revealed different methods to approaching news sources and different ways to handle them. Andy Carvin, founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries that work to bridge the digital divide, joined the conversation and suggested not to find news by getting information from only the source: it risks creating an echo chamber of false news.
Nowadays, verification and fact-checking are essential tools for digital journalism, where sources and social networks should always be used with care.
You can read the storify of the WJChat here.
All the links shared during the WJChat are available here.