Weekly meetings: JTI, AM!TT, and beyond

Last week’s meeting was about the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), the European effort to standardize quality process for journalism. Thanks so much to JTI lead Olaf Steenfadt for joining us, along with Scott Yates. We have recorded video of the presentation and some of the discussion. As usual, this is available on request to group members, but remains group confidential.

Some things discussed that particularly resonated for me:

• I appreciated the point that as with most industry self-regulation efforts, it’s about providing consumer safety. Many industries face this problem of some members of the industry not living up to the standards most of the industry considers appropriate.
• The word “trust” in JTI is both problematic and redundant, although it’s too difficult to change now. This is more about defining what is legitimate, real, high-quality journalism. All journalism is supposed to be trustworthy.
• I still get confused on how a whitelist (like this) is anything other than the complement of a blacklist (which this is explicitly not). I’m still looking for a distinction that feels right to me.
• There’s no answer yet on how this data might be interchanged, or how this all might be verified and used in practice
• Even though we’re past the comment period, and JTI is about to be finalized in the standards process, work will continue, and there should be ongoing revisions in due course.

Lots more details in the Meeting Records, scribed in duplicate.

Tomorrow’s meeting is about a plan to categorize misinformation attacks and allow data about them to be shared, potentially in real time. It’s an extension to MITRE ATT&CK™ (“A knowledge base for describing behavior of cyber adversaries across their intrusion lifecycle”) and is intended to be compatible with Cyber Threat Intelligence data exchange technologies STIX and TAXII.

For more, see the AM!TT Framework and/or come to tomorrow’s meeting.

Beyond tomorrow, for now I’ve scheduled four more meetings, continuing our Tuesday pattern (29 Oct, 5 Nov, 12 Nov, 19 Nov). I have IPTC penciled in for the 12th, and we have several other pending topics:

• What data protocols and formats should NewsQA, JTI, etc be using for exchanging data?
• How can we help manage these overlapping signals schemas?
• Is there a good objective framework for measuring credibility? (We asked the question in last years report. I recently had an idea I really like on this.)
• Should we update and re-issue the report? Are there people who want to help?
• What about credibility tools inside web browsers?
• Claim Review, data about fact checking
• NewsQA part 2, looking at specific signals

If you’d like to present or help organize on any of these topics, please let me know. We could also run them as an open discussion, without a presenter.