good & new alternative to the media
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Jeff Beer1 minute Read
We
all know that Google, Facebook, and Apple are ramping up their efforts
to fight the phenomenon of fake news. But for the recent French
presidential election, one newspaper took a decidedly lo-fi approach to
creating a new search engine.
Libération worked with ad agency JWT Paris to launch CheckNews.fr,
not run on algorithms but with real journalists researching real
questions. If you sent in a question, a journalist would track down the
truth behind the answer, with each query taking an average of 2.5 hours.
It may have been “the slowest search engine on earth,” but the paper
also boasted it was the most reliable. According
to JWT Paris, during the campaign that eventually saw moderate Emmanuel
Macron elected, #CheckNews became the most trending term on French
social media, with 128 million media impressions generated in three
days. The paper managed to cover and fact check 872 topics, and the
respone was so good, Libération has decided to turn it into a permanent
tool for its readers.