Examining the digital toolsets of journalists reporting on disinformation

The rise of the socially-connected web has created new reporting challenges for journalists—especially around the spread of mis-and disinformation—and required them to adopt new reporting methods. Increasingly, they have turned to digital tools to verify information, collect leads and story updates, and draw connections between content online. To better understand the range of such tools in current practice, and the processes that journalists use these tools for, we interview 12 national and international journalists who specifically report on mis-or disinformation. We ask them questions about the tools they use in their reporting, and ask them to recount narratives of reporting individual stories. From their responses, we have extracted the range of online tools they use in their journalistic practice, and categorized them according to how they are used in the process of reporting a story. We discuss the implications of our review for both for journalists and for prospective developers of digital tools for journalists.