BBC News is trying to popularize new reporting methods and increase transparency
NEW YORK (AP) — The BBC is more aggressively bringing “open source” reporting and efforts to expose disinformation into its daily reporting, a move that signals a potential shift in journalism’s embrace of new technology.
The newly announced creation of a new BBC Verify unit is also an effort by the news organization to be more transparent in its reporting, said Deborah Turnness, CEO of BBC News.
Open source reporting practitioners are moving beyond traditional methods of interviewing and examining public records to tell stories by using tools such as satellite imagery, cell phone recordings, advanced web search, and the like.
They’ve produced some compelling investigative reports, but Turnes is looking for more directness. For example, when Russia claimed a Ukrainian drone was attempting to attack the Kremlin, the BBC collected multiple videos of explosions in the night sky and quickly found video footage to chart police actions amid recent unrest at a housing complex.
The BBC has used satellite photos in an effort to document the planning and movements of both sides in the war in Ukraine.
“We’re taking a step forward to lead and experiment in this space,” Turnes said.
Many people active in open source reporting will be watching closely to see if the BBC succeeds, said Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley Law School.
“There is a real need for journalists to embrace these new methods of fact-finding to deepen their everyday stories,” says Koenig, who helps train students in their use.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both have strong storytelling units, but tend to focus on larger, more comprehensive investigations, such as the Times video “Day of Rage” that recreated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
More recently, both papers traced online records about the movements of a man accused of leaking classified material, and the Post found video to illustrate an Israeli raid on a civilian area of the West Bank this spring.
BBC Verify brings various business efforts — data and video analytics, fact-checking and countering disinformation — under one roof, Turnes said.
“If you talk to news consumers, they’ll tell you there’s so much chaos and confusion that they don’t know who to trust anymore,” said Turnness, an NBC News executive from 2013 to 2021. “I think that’s even worse in the US market.”
As a result, it’s vital for news organizations to be highly transparent about how they arrive at conclusions, especially when dealing with newer reporting methods, she said.
While Koenig agreed that this is important, she said great care should be taken to avoid increasing confusion.
“It may appear transparent on the surface, but it can actually cloud,” she said. “People don’t understand how to read satellite images.”
Turnness also wants to emphasize exposing disinformation, especially with the rapid advance of artificial intelligence.
“We will have to move at the same speed as the AI technology that is weaponizing most of the fake news,” she said.
