The Friday 5

What We’re Reading: Freelancing for Disinformation, How (Not) to Pitch, #ElectionWatchdog

By Tanya Pampalone | September 11, 2020

For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we found stories about freelancers commissioned to write for a massive Russian-backed disinformation campaign, how to (not) get your pitch read by an editor, the need to fact-check books, and a guide for reporting on the US election.

Russia Ensnares Freelancers in Disinformation Campaign (Reuters)

Freelancers: If you thought you only need to worry about malicious sources and bad information, here’s a reminder to ask who’s behind that next commission. Reuters interviewed six journalists about their commissions from the website Peace Data, which Facebook and Twitter — acting on a tip from the FBI — identified as the “center of a Russian political influence campaign targeting left wing voters in the United States, Britain, and other countries.” Approached on social media, freelancers were commissioned to write articles about the US presidential election and the pandemic, paying up to $250 per article. See also this New York Times piece on Peace Data. Careful out there.

7 Fatal Flaws of Story Pitches (Nieman Storyboard)

Here’s more advice for freelancers from Jacqui Banaszynski on Nieman Storyboard. She points out seven common mistakes that freelancers make when pitching to editors: 1. Failure to know the publication. 2. Failure to respect submission protocol. 3. Failure to honor the core: spelling, style, and grammar. 4. Failure to do a basic clips search. 5. Failure to be interesting. 6. Failure to focus. 7. Failure to sell yourself. Says Banaszynski: “Cut this out and tape it to your computer screen.” Also worth checking out are her suggestions of the Pitch Database on The Open Notebook; “Freelancing with Tim” on Substack; and Storyboard’s own The Pitch, where editors are interviewed about what they want in a good pitch. For more, check out GIJN’s guide on how to pitch a story.

OSINT Strategies (Secjuice)

OSINT — open source intelligence — is quite the rage among a new generation of reporters and researchers. (We used to call it reporting.) Secjuice, a nonprofit, volunteer-led publication focused on cybersecurity and OSINT, offers a new guide to planning open-source investigations. Part one: make a plan that identifies key questions and platforms to access. Part two gets into info gathering, including basics such as not using personal accounts for searches, collecting information first and analyzing it later, and setting up filters and alerts. Coming soon: part three on “processing.”

Fact-Checking Is Essential to Nonfiction. Why Do Publishers Refuse to Do It? (Esquire)

Journalists often turn to books by specialists as primary sources. But many might be surprised to learn that most publishers don’t fact-check nonfiction books — something de rigueur for respectable magazines in the not-so-distant past. Author Emma Copley Eisenberg writes in Esquire about how most nonfiction books are not fact-checked and, if they are, it is at the author’s expense. The amount Eisenberg paid — and the number of mistakes the young fact checker she hired found — could bring up your lunch. “The larger the mistake the harder it is for the writer to see it,” one author told her. If you’ve ever done fact-checking on an in-depth piece or been on the receiving end of a good fact-checker, you know just how easy mistakes can creep in. A good reminder for us all to fact check, fact check, and then fact check again.

Election Resources: Disinformation, Voting by Mail, #ElectionWatchdog

ProPublica’s Rachel Glickhouse and Jessica Huseman have produced a handy reporting guide on mail-in voting in the US elections, full of practical tips and background. Also worth checking out: the American Press Institute’s tips on covering election disinformation, fueled by the finding by First Draft and ProPublica that nearly half of top-performing Facebook posts that mention mail-in voting are false or misleading. And check out the Trusting News tip on FAQs on election coverage as well as Storybench’s Election Tracker 2020, which covers media reporting trends. Sneak preview: Next week GIJN will add its own Election Watchdog Alert, with a daily stream of the best tips and tools for covering the pivotal US contest. Look for us on Twitter under #ElectionWatchdog.

Tanya Pampalone is GIJN’s managing editor. She was executive editor of the Mail & Guardian and head of audience development at the African arm of The Conversation. Tanya contributed to Southern African Muckraking and Unbias the News, and is executive producer of the podcast One Night in Snake Park, which was released in September.

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