Abstract
Traditionally journalism is a key function for democracy. News used to be produced by professional journalists and the term "gatekeeper", used to describe a journalist's main task, filtering information, and when and how reliable news should be provided. However, users can now choose to get the information they want from many online sources, websites most of which are free and social media. Citizens of the digital era have plenty of opportunities not only to access information such as news, but also to produce, share or criticize such information, whose credibility is not always confirmed. This led to the beginning of the participatory journalism era where crowdsourcing techniques such as crowdwisdom (commenting on news media websites articles or on social media pages) play a significant role in the public sphere. However, crowdsourcing, social media sources and citizen journalism is often criticized as a key fake news generator while traditional journalism outlets seem more credible. This paper studies the fake news phenomenon in Greece using the walk-though method and statistical analysis for the 500 most popular Greek news websites exploring the confirmed cases of fake news revealed by the Facebook certified fact-checking website “Ellinika Hoaxes”. The findings of the study chart Greek media landscape characteristics and reveal new perspectives for traditional journalism, crowdsourcing and news distribution outlets credibility.
Author Information
Evangelos Lamprou, Ionian University, Greece
Nikos Antonopoulos, Ionian University, Greece
Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2020
Stream: Journalism
This paper is part of the MediAsia2020 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Lamprou E., & Antonopoulos N. (2021) Fake News, Crowdsourcing and Media Outlets in Greece: Is News Credibility a Matter of Professionalism? ISSN: 2186-5906 – The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2020: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2021.10
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2021.10
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