Wednesday, Apr 10, 2013
12:30 pm
IIT Institute of Design
350 N. LaSalle, 6th floor
RSVP to intheloop@id.iit.edu

Multiple fact-checking organizations have emerged in the United States over the last decade, groups which use trained staff and dedicated resources to assess the truth of public claims. Discussing his current research, Lucas Graves will examine a set of emergent practices, and an accompanying journalistic discourse, which have coalesced into a reform movement reaching to the center of the elite news media. Pointing to antecedents in partisan press, he’ll explore fact-checking as a critique — albeit a sharply constrained one — of both journalism and politics.

Lucas Graves is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where his research is about the fact-checking movement in American journalism as a window onto changes in the news ecosystem. Graves has worked as a technology and media analyst with Digital Technology Consulting and before that with Jupiter Research, where he covered Web technology as well as online advertising and commerce. He is also is a longtime magazine journalist, now on the masthead of Wired magazine. Graves holds an MA in Communications and an MS in Journalism from Columbiaʹs J‐School, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.