Released in January 2014 the Verification Handbook is a handbook of procedures dedicated to anyone working in the field that allows you to establish a plan for verification of sources and so-called user generated content in case of terrorist attacks, emergencies and other situations where is essential to give information which is first verified and then timely, as much as possible away from buffaloes alarmist and inaccurate news.

The damage done by a hoax news is twofold: on one hand there is bad information, the one that leads you to believe that autism is guilty of vaccines, that homeopathy is able to heal yourself, or you'll be forced to accommodate an immigrant, the other is the loss of credibility, publishing hoaxes helps to impoverish the image of journalism which, let's face it, not doing just fine.
Bad information, however, does not just pass through blatant hoaxes, designed to make easy money on clicks from people with little training on the dynamics of the Internet; misinformation is mostly a matter of analysis spans over nothing, fake photos, alarmism, unverified news.
One problem that affects not only patently dishonest websites or Facebook pages plotting, but also the major media outlets.
Often the writer blames the speed at which we are forced to react to the news.
No matter arrive with certainty, it is important to arrive before the others, because the truth is important, but SEO is the ultimate judge.
So to get in a hurry you plumb the company in search of videos and pictures of the place and you end up putting a video of a suicide bomber who has nothing to do, the photo of Syrian children, pretending to be refugees in Lampedusa, Article on video games that promote violence based on research it lacks scientific method, the analysis on Brexit that rests on conjecture without any foundation.
For this born Verification Handbook, a manual edited by Craig Silverman, who for us is most famous for having teased Hello Darwin and more generally the trash side of Italian television, but that is also an award-winning journalist, editor of Buzzfeed Canada and founder of Regret the error, the Poynter Institute, a blog that deals with errors, accuracy and occurs in journalism.
For the writing of the book Silverman he did not do everything alone, but made use of the collaboration of professionals and researchers working in the world's leading editors and for years has been for a journalism that take care of their sources.
"Oh, but test everything in the maximum emergency time is complex and difficult, it is quite normal to run into some mistakes."
Of course, perfection is not of this world, but for this it is important to decide immediately a standard procedure for the verification of the information, images and video.
If you know how and where to look it takes at most a minute to see if the photo of an explosion was taken at that time or if it is a few months old.
There are tools that allow you to determine with reasonable certainty whether we are faced with a false image or not, that allow you to quickly analyze a phenomenon through the use of social, that help journalists using people on site as trusted sources.
If you do not know do not blame the world is moving too fast, it's your fault that you can not keep up.
"But the training costs."
It is always said: the Verification Handbook cost is only long enough to read it.
The book is in fact available both as interactive website as a PDF and from a couple of weeks, there is also in Italian.
Yes, although its output in many of the Italian journalists he had been hailed as a decisive tool, it took about two and a half because someone decided to translate it.
In this case that someone is Andrea Coccia, one of the minds behind Slow News, an information website for subscription that professes a return to a world dell'informazioni slower, accurately and comprehensively.
"I think so absurd it took so long to have a translation in Italian," says Coccia, that being a freelance could work on this project with a minimum of calm is only thanks to the existence of a community of subscribers Slow News who, with their subscriptions, allowed him to take a break, refusing some work and translate the Verification Handbook.
"How is it possible that nobody has thought of it before?" Says Coccia, "But even more absurd is another thing: how is it that two weeks after virtually no tested output has spoken about it or has reported?" .
Being up to date is the duty of every good journalist: once a reporter asked to be there, to know the right people and write well, then it has become essential to know how to use a computer and do some research on the internet, now among the c skills' it is also knowing how to shoot short videos, learn about social networks, conduct a search for images on Google and extract EXIF data of a photo.
They are fundamental knowledge when you write about news, politics and society, but it can safely be useful in any area of a drawing.
If you do not know what we're talking maybe we should change professions or continue to complain about the caste.

From Wired