Documenting Hate
For the past several months, the 2017 CUNY Social Journalism cohort participated in a massive collaborative journalism project led by ProPublica.
Federal data on hate crimes is “deeply flawed” and reports of hate incidents have risen in the last two years. Journalists partnering with this project have found inadequate training for police officers, inconsistent social media hate speech policies and far too many swastikas. Solutions and conclusions need to be based in stronger data. Enter Documenting Hate.
More than 100 newsroom partners, five journalism schools (including our class at CUNY) and civil rights groups are collaborating to document and build a database of hate crimes and violent incidents. Our class searched social media for reports of verbal and physical abuse and vandalism. We would enter these pictures, videos and stories into Check, a tool for collaborative reporting built by Meedan. Shoutout to an xiao mina, Tom Trewinnard, P. Kim Bui and Social-J alum Rachel Glickhouse for guiding us through this process.
Check (described more fully here) was initially used during the ONA award-winning Electionland project. The tool creates a categorized database of links, allowing reporters to follow up on stories or trends they might not be able to find on their own. The national teams can follow trends and provide additional reporting resources. As the project progressed, the Meedan team built additional capacities for translation, browser extensions and reverse image searching to further serve this searching.
Journalism collaborations of this scale benefit by taking full advantage of the skills of the parter organizations. Local newsrooms are often the first responders of reporting, bringing a local story to the local audience who need the information fast. A collaboration with a national partner like ProPublica allows a more national perspective to connect the local story to wider trends.
Tools
In addition to Check, our class used several tools to search for content that we could send to the Documenting Hate team. Crowdtangle, a tool to track trending posts and topics on social media, released a set of tools for local publishers this October. Reporters can follow pre-constructed or custom lists of important civic figures like first responders, police departments and schools.
Unsurprisingly, incidents of hate receive high amounts of comments, shares, and reactions on social media. Tools like Crowdtangle and Banjo (built for geotagged specificity) help reporters track the posts, pictures and videos that resonate with their communities.
Local news organizations were often early to report on instances of vandalism. In instances with visual proof of a crime, we would find reports already published in local news, sometimes weeks in advance of a story percolating to a larger national publication. These stories, and the trends they represent on a national level are the building blocks for further investigation by the team at ProPublica.
For news organizations breaking stories across the country, collaborative tools like Check and projects like Documenting Hate provide extra eyes for the community. Reporters who are not looking for incidents of hate speech or vandalism benefit by getting tips from a wider collection of reporters. Students, developing reporting skills, have the opportunity to build relationships with local news organizations and better understand how events turn into stories. Moving forward I’m looking forward to seeing how more journalism programs incorporate collaborative reporting with local or national projects.
