7 Tips to Increase Your Online Media Literacy

We're all media cre­ators now, from blog­gers and pod­cast­ers to the most wet-behind-the-feathers Twitterer. Along with the new free­dom to cre­ate comes more respon­si­bil­ity: The new media ecosys­tem places an increased bur­den on all of us to become more per­cep­tive con­sumers and dis­sec­tors of media. In the age of We Media, it's impor­tant that we be able to dis­cern fact from fic­tion, to sep­a­rate reportage from spec­u­la­tion and to not become unwit­ting par­tic­i­pants in the lat­est spam scam.

In short, we need to sharpen our online media smarts. Every day, when we take a ride on our favorite search engines or tune in to our favorite news sites, we seem con­fi­dent that we know how to spot the good stuff and weed out the non­sense. But do we?

Here's a guide to help you opti­mize your BS detec­tor to deal with the new real­i­ties of demo­c­ra­tic media.

1. Give your trust to sources that earn it

Just as print news­pa­pers run the gamut from tabloid sleaze to the New York Times, so too you can find any fla­vor of news, from celebrity sleaze to pub­lic ser­vice jour­nal­ism, in the online arena.

What's changed in recent years is that we no longer rely just on tra­di­tional media brands for our news diet. Indi­vid­ual blog­gers, hyper­local news sites and alter­na­tive media pub­li­ca­tions now com­mand a good deal of our mind­share. Before you give your atten­tion and retweets to the new­com­ers, ask:

• Do I know who's behind this site, or are they hid­ing behind a cloak of anonymity? Use easywhois.com to find out who owns the domain if there's no author listed.

• Has the site been around for a while? Alexa will tell you.

• Is there a way for users to leave com­ments on the site or com­mu­ni­cate with the producer?

• Does the news source link to mate­ri­als that authen­ti­cate his report?

• Does the source have a pres­ence on Twitter?

• Are other users link­ing to the site? Check on Tech­no­rati for the site's "link authority."

Even gen­er­ally reli­able infor­ma­tion sources on the Web aren't wholly reli­able. For instance, just because it's on Wikipedia doesn't make it true, as I learned first-hand from peo­ple like For­rest Sawyer, who told me his Wikipedia entry is rid­dled with errors. Don't take entries at face value -- fol­low the source mate­r­ial to see if it adds up.

What's impor­tant is not whether news or infor­ma­tion out­lets occa­sion­ally slip up -- we all do -- but whether they have mech­a­nisms in place to pre­vent and cor­rect mis­takes. In other words, minor blips notwith­stand­ing, are they earn­ing our trust?

2. Get out of your bubble

A gen­er­a­tion ago, Wal­ter Cronkite said that an informed cit­i­zen needs to check mul­ti­ple sto­ries from mul­ti­ple loca­tions rather than rely on a sin­gle news source, whether it's the New York Times or CBS News. His advice res­onates even more strongly today with the rise of hyper-partisan media from the right and the left.

Avoid the media echo cham­ber, which exposes you to only a nar­row prism of views and dis­course. A good way to burst your iso­la­tion bub­ble: Broaden your online diet by book­mark­ing over­seas news sites.

Good choices include BBC.co.uk, the Guardian, Finland's Helsin­gin Sanomat, Israel's Haaretz, Australia's News.com or the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Com­pany. Read oppos­ing points of view. Use a news reader to sub­scribe to a search term like "health care reform" or "Afghanistan war" to fun­nel in an even more diverse range of coverage.

3. Suss out Inter­net hoaxes

When my rel­a­tives con­tact me about a chain let­ter in their in-box - like the pur­ported "dry run" by Mus­lim ter­ror­ists on an Air­Tran flight or fab­ri­ca­tions about social secu­rity taxes - I direct them to Snopes and tell them to check for them­selves. More often than not, Snopes has vet­ted and debunked the account.

Other sites for vet­ting Inter­net rumors include:

• BreakTheChain.org

• About.com: Urban Legends

• ScamBusters.org

• HoaxKill

• Don't Spread That Hoax!

• Sophos

• Vmyths (com­puter viruses)

4. Use your social network

Crowd­source your fact-checking. If you're on Twit­ter (and chances are you should be), don't be shy about ask­ing your fol­low­ers, "Is this true?" instead of just pass­ing along some­thing from an unknown source. Chances are that a mem­ber of your posse will do some sleuthing and give it a thumbs up or down.

A new search engine, Aard­vark, has put this for­mula to good use. Enter a query and Aard­vark will ping your social net­work to find the answer to your question.

5. Judge the journalism

At the non­profit news net­work New­sTrust, a small team offers "an infor­ma­tion cred­i­bil­ity fil­ter, news lit­er­acy tools and a civic engage­ment net­work." A bipar­ti­san com­mu­nity of news eval­u­a­tors makes judg­ments to deter­mine whether a news story exhibits bias, makes unver­i­fied fac­tual claims and pro­vides needed con­text and sourc­ing. Any­one can par­tic­i­pate by using the site's review tools.

Another com­mu­nity, Fair­spin, also encour­ages read­ers to work together to reveal the bias behind today's news. Users can vote on sto­ries to flag opin­ion dis­guised as fact and judge the degree of polit­i­cal bias detected in sto­ries from both the left and right.

6. Other vet­ting tools

The Inter­net may be a swamp of mis­in­for­ma­tion, but it's also the most incred­i­ble fact-checking appa­ra­tus ever invented. Some tools that should be in your arsenal:

• Cam­paign Desk from Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review cri­tiques media cov­er­age of pol­i­tics and pol­icy each week­day, sep­a­rat­ing spin from substance.

• Factchecked.org pro­vides edu­ca­tors and stu­dents with a frame­work for ana­lyz­ing infor­ma­tion and avoid­ing decep­tion in the media.

• FactCheck.org, its sis­ter site, run by the Annen­berg Pub­lic Pol­icy Cen­ter, focuses on polit­i­cal bias in the news.

• Media Mat­ters for Amer­ica is a non­profit pro­gres­sive research and infor­ma­tion cen­ter ded­i­cated to mon­i­tor­ing, ana­lyz­ing and cor­rect­ing con­ser­v­a­tive mis­in­for­ma­tion in the media.

• Fair­ness and Accu­racy in Report­ing (FAIR) is one of the longest-running media watch groups mon­i­tor­ing media bias and censorship.

• Metafil­ter and sim­i­lar com­mu­nity sites offer robust dis­cus­sions of cur­rent events.

Author and pro­fes­sor Howard Rhein­gold, who did this won­der­ful short video with me on 21st cen­tury media lit­era­cies at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity in July, cited two addi­tional tools in a series at SFGate:

• Twit­ter Jour­nal­ism ("Where News and Tweets Con­verge") pub­lished a series of steps to ver­ify a tweet, includ­ing check­ing the his­tory of past tweets by a per­son to see what con­text you might find before retweet­ing a claim about a news event.

• Intel labs' trippy Dis­pute Finder Fire­fox Exten­sion "high­lights dis­puted claims on web pages you browse and shows you evi­dence for alter­na­tive points of view."

• Ques­tion­ing Video helps you under­stand the vocab­u­lary of visual decep­tion that can be used to dis­tort TV news.

Media lit­er­acy, after all, is not about reveal­ing truths. It's about crit­i­cal think­ing and interpretation.

7. Com­mit a ran­dom act of journalism

To really under­stand what goes into cre­at­ing a story, try it your­self. Next time you're at a pub­lic event, be the media: Whip out your favorite mobile device, take some pho­tos or video, add some text and zap it off to a media shar­ing site.

Next time you come across a sim­i­lar media report, you'll likely have a deeper under­stand­ing of what goes into the process. And maybe a more sym­pa­thetic outlook.

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JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.