Check Your Facts

Jan Kuciak (27) and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová (27) were murdered because of Jan's investigative work. We talk about the events and its impacts on Slovak and European journalism. Condolences: www.allforjan.com His last piece of work in Slovakian: www.aktuality.sk/clanok/568007/talianska-mafia-na-slovensku-jej-chapadla-siahaju-aj-do-politiky/ in English: www.politico.eu/article/jan-kuciak-last-story-italian-mafias-tentacles-reach-into-slovak-politics/ in German:...

Eva Schulz is a journalist, online video show host, presenter and producer. Currently she is hosting Deutschland3000, a Facebook show by German public broadcasters, that covers politics for a millennial audience. Prior to that, she co-created Hochkant, a Snapchat news channel for 14- to 19-year-olds. Eva has started blogging very young and her first foreign language as she puts it was HTML. We had a very deep dive into online video, platforms and formats. Twitter:...

Bettina Figl is a reporter at Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung. But she is also a research fellow at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. There she published a paper about data journalism and small newsrooms. She talks with us at Check Your Facts podcast about how she managed to find her way into Oxford University and what she found out researching several newsrooms. This may help you implementing or strenghten data driven modules in you newsroom as...

Eva Mošpánová is a journalist for the Czech public radio, she writes for the iRozhlas.cz, which is a fairly newly developed news website of the broadcasting company. We spoke with Eva, because she knows the Czech media market, she has covered it in the past writing for Marketing & Media magazine and also worked for other different media outlets. Czech republic has seen many changes in the media landscape in the last few years, when oligarchs and politicians bought up stakes in traditional...

We spoke with Taja Topolovec, the co-founder of Pod črto (in Eng., ‘The Bottom Line’). It is a Slovenian independent and non-profit media outlet focusing on investigative reporting, data journalism and in-depth stories, founded in September 2014. Their projects include in-depth analysis of the prevalence and reasons for violent crime in Slovenia, uncovering corruption among Slovenia’s mayors and investigating fraud, mismanagement of European funds, illegal gathering of personal information...

Karim Maassen is a Dutch entrepreneur and web fanatic, he is also the founder of nwzer. nwzer is an AI and blockchain assisted, user-generated news agency. It is the world’s first artificial intelligence & blockchain powered citizen journalism platform. According do Karim, nwzer seeks to harness the wisdom of the crowds, remove advertising from the equation and build on trust. We had a long discussion about blockchain, why he would rather not use the word when explaining nwzer and how he...

On this week's and this year's last podcast episode we spoke to three journalists from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania about what is happening with media and journalism in their countries. Liepa Zelniene is a political journalist for 15min in Lithuania. In 2016 she has started a fact checking unit inside her newsroom. Marian Männi is a journalist, media analyst and data fan. She has worked for the biggest Estonian media and is the co-founder of a fixing agency called fixers.press. Filips...

David talks about the daily news podcast that SME.sk in Slovakia has launched one month ago. The podcast reached 100.000 listens (plays, downloads…) in one month. At the beginning there was a two-week period experimenting with different formats and after that the podcast went live. If you want to know more about this, listen in. Related reading: https://medium.com/check-your-facts/here-is-why-the-podcast-revolution-has-not-happened-in-europe-yet-39d9807f95b8

Johannes works for Die Süddeutsche Zeitung at their Brand Studio and also works on innovation there. He is interested in the future of publishing, advertising, also AI and chatbots. We talked with him about branded content and native advertising, chatbots, AI and voice assistants. Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Klingebeil Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/klingebeil/ Newsletter (german): http://johannesklingebiel.de/ Facebook group "Edgeland Reisegruppe":...

Federica Cherubini is the International Head of Knowledge Sharing at Condé Nast International. Her role leverages and supports the exchange of knowledge, ideas, contacts and best practice cases between editorial, commercial and product teams of the CNI's portfolio across eleven countries. Previously, she was part of the Digital News Project team at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, for which she wrote, together with Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the...

Lea Berriault is the managing editor of NewsMavens, currently overseeing the day-to-day editorial activities of NewsMavens.com, a Google DNI-funded daily news roundup from top women editors in Europe. NewsMavens is a collaboration between partnering news organizations. Each newspaper, broadcaster, magazine or portal has designated a woman journalist or editor to curate stories from their media to our collective round-up. Newsmavens: https://newsmavens.com/ Facebook:...

Kat Downs Mulder is Graphics Director at The Washington Post. She and her team are responsible for infographics, news apps and digital story design at the Post. We met her at the News Impact Summit in Budapest, where Kat was presenting the way they do the graphic work at the Washington Post. We decided that you also need to know this and so we invited her to talk about the Post's graphic development, their different approaches on mobile and social – and on the newspaper. In the end you may...

Filip Struhárik is editor and social media manager at Denník N, one of Slovakia's news platform. He recently discovered a huge loss of media pages' reach on Facebook and wrote about it. We talk with him about the tests Facebook is doing in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia (plus Indonesia) where all page posts are banned from the Newsfeed and put into its new Explore feed. Filip Struhárik TW: https://twitter.com/filip_struharik FB:...

Emily Goligoski is Research Director for the Membership Puzzle Project, which is is founded by NYU professor Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 program and De Correspondent. Emily acts as an advocate for news consumers and delivers actionable insights to media organizations. She was the first user experience research lead in The New York Times newsroom and brought design research to Mozilla Foundation. She is a board member of the education non-profit Youth Radio and holds degrees from Northwestern and...

We talked to Beata Biel of TVN 24 who was a trainer for Google News Lab, traveled around many european newsrooms and has a lot to share about her experiences. Beata Biel Twitter: https://twitter.com/beatabiel Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beatabiel/ Web: https://beatabiel.com/ VSquare: https://vsquare.org/investigations/ Onet.pl: https://www.onet.pl/ Onet app on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.onet.onethd Onet app on iOS:...

Marc and David met for the first time on a conference in Budapest, here is a quick dispatch, a proper episode coming next week.

For the first time we speak to a Hungarian journalist. His name is András Pethő and he is the co-founder & editor at the investigative project called Direkt36. András spent much of his 14-year-long journalism career at Origo, with some longer stints abroad. He worked for 15 months for the BBC World Service and did two journalism fellowships in the United States. In 2013 he spent 8 months with the investigative unit of The Washington Post. We talked to András about investigative journalism in...

Why is Germany so precise when it comes to law making? And does this affect the rest of Europe? Peter Hense is a lawyer in Leipzig, Germany, and is specialised in technology and media law. In this episode we talk with him about german law drafts affecting Google and Facebook and what these platforms think about that. Yes, law is complex, but Peter explains it in an understandable way. Peter Hense >> Twitter: twitter.com/peterhense >> LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/peter-hense-19861318/ Spirit...

How to change journalism for better? Albertine Piels and Nienke Huitenga from Hackastory have some tips and also teach us how to analyze our audience (but you have to listen all the way till the end). Albertine and Nienke both work and are Hackastory which has a very clear mission: Changing journalism for the better. Their work formula goes like this: Idea + Experiment + Test = WOW In the podcast episode we talk about Hackastory and their mission, we dive deep into hackathons and find out...

We talked to Jakub about his newly founded project/initiative Outriders about how he is building it, what is the thinking behind content and distribution and what are his goals. Jakub has been in media and journalism in Poland for some years now, working on open data and travel blogging. He also tells us a little bit about the media situation in his country. Apart from that we talked a lot about podcasting in Europe, about different distribution channels and why newsletters are still very...