Abstract
The current media ecosystem, derived from the consolidation of Information and Communication Technologies, shows a scenario in which the relationship between the media and their audience is being redefined. This represents a challenge for journalistic practice. In the digital age, the public actively participates in the construction and dissemination of news through social networks. Faced with this loss of control by the media, fake news and disinformation are emerging as one of the main problems of journalistic practice in a competitive business context, and with a high saturation of news content. In this situation, fact checkers emerge as key players in the information verification process. This research comparatively analyses the main fact checkers in Spain and the United Kingdom through content analysis applied to their corporate websites to understand their characteristics and working methodologies. The results underline that they are concerned with the concepts of transparency and honesty, along with showing their funding streams. The rigorousness of the verification process also stands out, as well as the importance of dialogue with the audience in their work. While in Spain they are featured by their non-profit nature and their international coverage, UK fact checkers focus on national information and are sometimes conceived as a business.
Highlights
Nowadays, journalistic practice is immersed in a context of huge transformations, motivated, among other factors, by the increasingly proactive role of the audience in the production and dissemination of news through the tools provided by Information and Communication Technologies [1]
In the digital era, we can speak in terms of the proactivity of the audience, as well as the journalistic profession which, through fact checkers, offers its response to the dissemination, consumption and interpretation of the media by the public in today’s society
The mission of fact checkers and their relevance in the field of journalism transcends the specific events or phenomena they investigate, such as the COVID-19 pandemic [83], to promote themselves as important and necessary actors involved in certifying the veracity of news and facts in different fields of activity, with politics being the most common [84] but not the only one they focus on
Summary
Journalistic practice is immersed in a context of huge transformations, motivated, among other factors, by the increasingly proactive role of the audience in the production and dissemination of news through the tools provided by Information and Communication Technologies [1]. In the current communication ecosystem, dominated by a hyper-connected society with high levels of information demands, new narratives and new professional profiles are required in order to examine content “critically to build a citizenry that is aware of its role in society” [2] In addition to the necessary education and digital literacy, fact checkers are agents that identify, verify and evaluate the veracity of the news. It is one of the professional profiles required to foster a critical spirit in society in the digital era. Previous studies portray the current landscape of fact checkers in Spain [4,5], or in other countries such as China [6] or the United States [7]
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