German Public Service Broadcaster ZDF chooses Truly Media to support editorial verification

Athens Technology Center S.A. (ATC) is pleased to announce that Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), one of Europe’s biggest public service broadcasters and leading media organization in Germany, has acquired a Truly Media licence to support fact checking and verification, especially for its news programmes.

Truly Media supports ZDF’s recently established fact checking team to aggregate and verify content from a diverse range of sources with a particular focus on Social Networks. The platform has already been proven to be a valuable tool for Deutsche Welle’s (DW’s) editorial teams and has also been tested by various German media organisations during the 2017 German Elections.

Nikos Sarris, Head of ATC’s Innovation Lab noted: “Truly Media has its technical origins in R&D projects; yet, business-wise, it incorporates ATC’s 15+ years of experience in providing ICT solutions to the media industry and DW’s unique knowledge of contemporary user needs and workflows.  We are more than proud of this new partnership, also because it proves that public media organisations invest in new technologies to fight disinformation, which is so seriously harming democracies all around the world.”.

Wilfried Runde, Head of Research and Cooperation Projects at Deutsche Welle, adds: “Having ZDF join the Truly Media user base is really exciting. ZDF’s specific requirements to support a wide range of quality news programmes with verification and fact checking features will provide excellent opportunities for collaborative verification, and also allows us to further improve the platform for all current and future customers.

The community is growing!

In this context it is worth noting that Truly Media also received positive feedback from all the organizations that are currently testing the platform as part of the European Observatory against Disinformation.


The GEN Summit is the annual meeting of the largest network of CEOs, editorial directors, editors-in-chief and senior media executives from both the print and online sector, coming together from around the world. During the conference, a group of diverse speakers and attendees who are at the forefront of journalism, media, and technology, share their ideas and discuss many of the challenges the news industry is facing.

 

This year, the GEN Summit will focus on the “VVV Challenges: Voice, Visual Journalism and Verification“: three areas in which the global media industry has identified major disruptions due to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, storytelling and disinformation.

In this context, Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international public service broadcaster, and Athens Technology Center (ATC), a leading software provider for publishers and news agencies, once again join forces and participate in the event showcasing Truly Media, the collaborative platform they developed to help users analyse and assess the trustworthiness of digital content.

The platform supports media organisations in their efforts to fight disinformation, while it has also been proven highly useful in other critical areas, as shown by Amnesty International using Truly Media to investigate human rights violations.