A team made up of members of Maldita.es and laSexta wins the Editors Lab in Spain and advances to the world final

The world final will be in Lisbon, during the  GEN Summit 2018,  between May 30 and June 1, 2018.

The Spanish competition was held at the headquarters of El Confidencial (thank you colleagues), organizer together with the  Global Editors Network (GEN)  and with the support of Google News Lab. 11 media outlets participated and developed (very good) tools for two days to improve and innovate in the coverage of the last hour:

• Diari Ara, with Ara Stories.
• Cadena Ser, with Alert.
• Media.cat with its Thermometer on Censorship.
• MediaLab-Prado with Linked Data-Driven Context.
• CCMA with the Citizen Verifier.
• Videona with its News Noise Reducer.
• Nació Digital and its Timelined chat for breaking news coverages.
• Vocento with El Correo Zoom.
• El Confidencial with Funnel.
• Diario de Navarra with the Field Hospital for information.
• And finally,  Maldita.es / laSexta  with Breaking Hoaxes.

The data journalist Nacho Calle, the developer David Fernández and the designer Alberto Reverón attended on behalf of the team made up of members of Maldita.es and laSexta. We would like to congratulate Diari Ara and El Confidencial, to whom the jury awarded a special mention, and the rest of the participants for the high level of all the projects. We also want to thank the Jury for evaluating our project in this way and for their involvement and help in focusing it, with special thanks to Ana Ormaechea and Eva Morell for their clarity and guidelines.

What is the ‘Breaking Hoaxes’ project that we have presented?

A web application that allows you to search official sources, reliable sources of the latest denials. It is intended for editors, with a structure divided by blocks and filters.  On the one hand, accounts are added on social networks -such as, for example, Twitter accounts from official sources-. In addition, it is possible to add web pages so that the system scrapes them, obtaining press releases and information published on institutional websites or other media in real time and as the event develops.  The editorial team can provide reliable sources that have been confirmed by experience or by editorial commitment to the medium. The web application is updated at the same time with the denials that Maldita.es team makes during the event. The user will receive desktop notifications each time a denial is included. The editor will have reliable information and will be able to contrast the latest data that arrives. In the newsroom, journalists will be able to contrast and verify the latest data. In the field, journalists will have access to a large amount of information, with the possibility of filtering it by its origin, and carrying out searches to confirm data in seconds. It is a very light application, with exclusively text-based communications, so it works even at times when coverage is low due to terminal saturation or location. It is a web application built with free software, based on the PHP Symfony framework. The end user dashboard is a single-page in which all information is manipulated using Javascript, without the page reloading. That way the user does not lose the state of the page they were in (scroll, open information, etc.) when performing other actions. To scrape information, you can use any script that allows you to connect to a MySQL database. For this example we have used Python scripts, although in the case of the prototype we have previously loaded information into the database and supplied it on demand. Finally, the denied information comes from the API that Maldita.es / MalditoBulo already has available. Likewise, the information sent to the Maldita team for verification would be connected to an endpoint of that same API.*The headline has explained himself better to clarify that it is a team that had members from both projects. Maldita.es does not belong and has never belonged to laSexta.