Takin' Out The Trash

For my final project, I wanted to use the data set that shows the biggest fake news stories of the year, using examples from 2017 and 2018. I chose this data set because I found it to be an interesting and aesthetic visualization and also is the most relevant to my line of work. I am creating this blog as the rough draft of the final project. The final I will create with the target audience in my being my peers at work. I am intending this to be a training tool for new reporters or digital writers to understand the importance of fact checking and how to write eye-catching headlines. I've found that most fake news is spread as fast as it does because the headlines are so attention-grabbing that others feel inclined to share. From the perspective of the journalist who needs to vet if a story is real or not, it's easy to take a source's word as truth, but this visualization is intended to help illustrate to our reporters on what not to do.

I'm planning to create a powerpoint project that will go with a speaker. For the sake of this final project, I imagine I will be giving this presentation to my peers on writing for the website. The goals of the presentation are to show reporters how to accurately report the news and write good headlines while also learning how to issue a correction if the original story has changed or developed.

SLIDE #1

I would start this presentation with a cold open - a simple interactive game with the audience of true or false using the individual headlines from the data set. They have no context of what the headlines mean or where they are from. I added the images of a newspaper and mic to make it look more fun and playful in the hopes of getting people to participate in the game.

This game will tie into the main messaging later that reporting accurate news stories is important for the right story to be remembered. At this point, the audience will not know that these are "junk" news headlines... that is the fun of the game.

SLIDES #2 - #7 (ISH)

I'm planning to have 5-7 slides of these headlines pulled from the data that they have to guess are true or false.

This is the part where I am establishing the "junk" news headlines. After a few slides of the headlines individually, I will tell the audience which ones turned out to be "not true". From there, I will have two fake stories side by side, showing the size difference. This will be the part where I illustrate how much play each "fake" story got in the media and on Google.

SLIDES #8 - #13

For the next couple of slides, will be a comparision for size based on how much the article healine was Googled. This is to illustrate how far a junk story can spread in the world, illustrating how important it is to be accurate.