Our students are not the only ones struggling with verifying credibility.

Journalists, especially those dealing with the crunch of deadlines and the flood of social media during a crisis, fall prey to hoaxes, phoney tweets and image fakery as well.

Verification Handbook, a new, free ebook published by the European Journalism Centre, offers a series of case studies that illustrate strategies for evaluating digital content and step-by-step tips for verifying user-generated content.  The Handbook’s editor is Craig Silverman, of the Poynter Institute.

While the intended audience for the Handbook is journalists and crisis aid providers, it has value for student reporters and would be useful in high school information literacy instruction.

The ten chapters cover such topics as image and video verification and creating a verification process and checklist.  Chapter 10 shares a helpful list of verification tools.

Silverman plans to update the book as the media landscape continues to shift.

See this previous post on Sandy and Media Literacy and this one on NoodleTools information literacy tools.