Check Your Facts

Jan Kuciak (27) and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová (27) were murdered because of Jan's investigative work. We talk about the events and its impacts on Slovak and European journalism.

Condolences: www.allforjan.com

His last piece of work

in Slovakian: www.aktuality.sk/clanok/568007/talianska-mafia-na-slovensku-jej-chapadla-siahaju-aj-do-politiky/

in English: www.politico.eu/article/jan-kuciak-last-story-italian-mafias-tentacles-reach-into-slovak-politics/

in German: www.bild.de/politik/ausland/kuciak-jan/letzter-artikel-kuciak-54960746.bild.html

Eva Schulz is a journalist, online video show host, presenter and producer.

Currently she is hosting Deutschland3000, a Facebook show by German public broadcasters, that covers politics for a millennial audience.

Prior to that, she co-created Hochkant, a Snapchat news channel for 14- to 19-year-olds.

Eva has started blogging very young and her first foreign language as she puts it was HTML.

We had a very deep dive into online video, platforms and formats.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/evaschulz

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evaschulz

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evaschulz

Deutschland 3000: https://www.facebook.com/Deutschland3000/

Photo credit: Alex Janetzko

Bettina Figl is a reporter at Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung. But she is also a research fellow at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. There she published a paper about data journalism and small newsrooms.

She talks with us at Check Your Facts podcast about how she managed to find her way into Oxford University and what she found out researching several newsrooms. This may help you implementing or strenghten data driven modules in you newsroom as well.

When Bettina is not writing papers on digital journalism or working for Wiener Zeitung she is organising an event in Vienna called „Aufmacher“ („lead story“). She and her colleagues invite journalists to talk — very casually —  about their job. The best thing: it is free and open for everyone.

As usual we also talk about the media landscape and current issues in the guest’s homecountry which is Austria this time.

Again, you will find many insights on our guest and her work — and even more.

Eva Mošpánová is a journalist for the Czech public radio, she writes for the iRozhlas.cz, which is a fairly newly developed news website of the broadcasting company.

We spoke with Eva, because she knows the Czech media market, she has covered it in the past writing for Marketing & Media magazine and also worked for other different media outlets.

Czech republic has seen many changes in the media landscape in the last few years, when oligarchs and politicians bought up stakes in traditional media and many journalists left them to start independently operated smaller news operations.

Also the fake news problem has been a huge problem as many alternative media emerged and some of them became widely popular.

After the Czech presidential elections a wave emerged, similar to the one in USA in the end of 2017, when people started publicly sharing that they bought a subscription for a newspaper or online website they trust.

We talked about all of this. Listen to our interview.

Twitter: ht

We spoke with Taja Topolovec, the co-founder of Pod črto (in Eng., ‘The Bottom Line’). It is a Slovenian independent and non-profit media outlet focusing on investigative reporting, data journalism and in-depth stories, founded in September 2014.

Their projects include in-depth analysis of the prevalence and reasons for violent crime in Slovenia, uncovering corruption among Slovenia’s mayors and investigating fraud, mismanagement of European funds, illegal gathering of personal information by Slovenian police (last story), environmental issues, systematic analysis of health system and poverty in Slovenia.

Because investigative journalism in Slovenia could be also translated as “researching”, Pod črto journalists were at first perceived as scientists. So first they had to launch a communication campaign explaining what investigative journalism is and what they intend to do.

What did we talk about:

• history of Pod črto and how did their crowdfunding campaign go

• the problem with inv

Karim Maassen is a Dutch entrepreneur and web fanatic, he is also the founder of nwzer.

nwzer is an AI and blockchain assisted, user-generated news agency. It is the world’s first artificial intelligence & blockchain powered citizen journalism platform.

According do Karim, nwzer seeks to harness the wisdom of the crowds, remove advertising from the equation and build on trust.

We had a long discussion about blockchain, why he would rather not use the word when explaining nwzer and how he sees the technology being used in journalism.

Karim Maassen

https://twitter.com/KarimMaassen

http://www.karimmaassen.com/

nzwer

Website: http://www.nwzer.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nwzer

Sign-up for alpha testing: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/nwzer

Civil, the blockchain-based journalism marketplace http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/civil-the-blockchain-based-journalism-marketplace-is-building-its-first-batch-of-publications/

How the Blockchain is Redefining Trust https://www.wi

On this week's and this year's last podcast episode we spoke to three journalists from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania about what is happening with media and journalism in their countries.

Liepa Zelniene is a political journalist for 15min in Lithuania. In 2016 she has started a fact checking unit inside her newsroom.

Marian Männi is a journalist, media analyst and data fan. She has worked for the biggest Estonian media and is the co-founder of a fixing agency called fixers.press.

Filips Lastovskis is a political journalist for Delfi in Latvia. He is interested in Education and European Union politics.

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What have we talked about in this episode

• Baltic media crash course 101

• Public vs. private media journalism

• Political influence

• Russian influence

• Best recent media developments

David talks about the daily news podcast that SME.sk in Slovakia has launched one month ago. The podcast reached 100.000 listens (plays, downloads…) in one month.

At the beginning there was a two-week period experimenting with different formats and after that the podcast went live.

If you want to know more about this, listen in.

Related reading:

https://medium.com/check-your-facts/here-is-why-the-podcast-revolution-has-not-happened-in-europe-yet-39d9807f95b8

Johannes works for Die Süddeutsche Zeitung at their Brand Studio and also works on innovation there. He is interested in the future of publishing, advertising, also AI and chatbots.

We talked with him about branded content and native advertising, chatbots, AI and voice assistants.

Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Klingebeil

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/klingebeil/

Newsletter (german): http://johannesklingebiel.de/

Facebook group "Edgeland Reisegruppe": https://www.facebook.com/groups/131575447543200/

Johannes @ Medium: https://medium.com/@Klingebeil

Thoughts on Journalism Medium publication: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-journalism

Katharine Viner (The Guardian is now funded by more than 800,000 supporters) https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/oct/26/together-we-are-safeguarding-the-guardians-independent-journalism

People writing on future to follow (recommended by Johannes):

Amy Webb: https://twitter.com/amywebb

2018 Tech Trends For Journalism Report: https://

Federica Cherubini is the International Head of Knowledge Sharing at Condé Nast International. Her role leverages and supports the exchange of knowledge, ideas, contacts and best practice cases between editorial, commercial and product teams of the CNI's portfolio across eleven countries.

Previously, she was part of the Digital News Project team at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, for which she wrote, together with Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the report Editorial analytics: how news media are developing and using audience data and metrics. She was also one of the co-authors of the reports The future of online news video and The Rise of Fact-Checking Sites in Europe.

From 2010 to 2016 she worked for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) on projects focused on examining how journalism's present will lead to its future.

She is one of the co-organisers of Hacks/Hackers London, which brings together journalists (“hac