First Draft News was a London-based non-profit project dedicated to fighting misinformation and disinformation online. Founded in June 2015 by a coalition of nine organisations brought together by the Google News Lab, it became one of the most influential journalism-support initiatives of the fake-news era, pioneering collaborative fact-checking through its CrossCheck project and producing widely used verification guides and training. It operated for seven years before shutting down in June 2022, when its mission was transferred to the Information Futures Lab at the Brown University School of Public Health.
Overview
First Draft described its mission as empowering societies with accurate information in critical moments and ensuring the integrity of the world's information ecosystem. Rather than operating as a conventional newsroom, it functioned as a coalition hub: it developed and delivered pioneering techniques, tools and training for how information is discovered, shared and presented to the public, and it coordinated partnerships between newsrooms, technology companies, human rights organisations and academic institutions. Its website, firstdraftnews.org, published quick-reference resources, case studies and best-practice recommendations for journalists, operated without advertising or sponsored content, and was developed and maintained with support from the Google News Lab. At the time of its closure it was headquartered in London, with a New York bureau housed at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a Sydney bureau based at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology Sydney.
Founding: a coalition is born
First Draft was launched in June 2015 as a non-profit project, initially fiscally sponsored by the Eyewitness Media Hub, to raise awareness of and address challenges relating to trust and truth in the digital age. It was brought into being by the Google News Lab, which assembled nine founding partner organisations including Facebook, Twitter, the Open Society Foundations and several philanthropic bodies. The project drew on experts and organisations already working in the field of verification, including Reported.ly, the Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful and Meedan. Its early leadership included managing director Jenni Sargent and research director Claire Wardle, a specialist in user-generated content who became the organisation's most prominent public face.
What First Draft set out to do
The organisation's focus was practical: how journalists and human rights researchers could find, verify and publish content sourced from the social web. Its areas of attention included misattributed and manipulated images circulating online, eyewitness photographs and videos captured at the scene of news events, claims and content shared on social media and private messaging apps, and hoaxes and fake stories generated for financial or political gain. Its guides and case studies were written by representatives of the founding partners and by its own research team, and it ran a weekly newsletter keeping readers up to date with its research, training programmes and collaborative projects.
The Partner Network
In September 2016 First Draft launched the First Draft Partner Network, the first initiative of its kind to bring the largest social platforms together with global newsrooms, human rights organisations and fact-checking and verification projects. The launch expanded the founding coalition significantly: new members included The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News and CNN, alongside Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Jenni Sargent said the network recognised that finding solutions required the social platforms to be part of the conversation rather than outside it. The network was built on the idea that the scale of the challenge around filtering factual information and authentic content could only be tackled through global collaboration, with members sharing tools, methods and training.
CrossCheck and the 2017 French election
First Draft's most celebrated initiative was CrossCheck, a collaborative verification project launched in February 2017 ahead of the French presidential election. It united 37 newsroom partners, mainly from France and Britain, including the BBC, Channel 4 News, Le Monde and its Les Dcodeurs fact-checking team, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Libration and Les Echos, alongside journalism students and technology partners. Newsrooms communicated via Slack and used a shared content-management system to flag dubious stories and social media posts, with around 60 journalists actively investigating. Members of the public could submit questions through a Hearken plugin, and the public submitted around 600 questions. The project produced 64 reports, each reviewed by multiple newsrooms, debunking rumours such as claims that 30 per cent of Emmanuel Macron's campaign funding came from Saudi Arabia, that France was spending 100 million euros to buy hotels to house immigrants, and that the country planned to replace Christian public holidays with Muslim and Jewish holidays. Reports were labelled with credibility icons including True, False, Caution, Insufficient Evidence and Attention, and displayed the logos of the newsrooms that had verified them. First Draft described CrossCheck as a living laboratory and went on to run similar collaborative projects around the 2017 UK and German elections.
The taxonomy of misinformation
First Draft also shaped the language of the field. In February 2017 Claire Wardle published a widely cited taxonomy distinguishing seven types of mis- and disinformation, an effort to move public discussion beyond the catch-all label of fake news. The taxonomy covered forms ranging from fabricated and manipulated content to misleading framing and satire, and it became a standard reference for journalists, researchers and educators. Academic studies of the CrossCheck France articles later used the taxonomy's categories to analyse how rumours were marked, distinguishing claims rated False from those marked Attention, the latter used for claims that were partially true but exaggerated or presented misleadingly.
Verification guides and training
Alongside its collaborative projects, First Draft produced an extensive body of educational material. Its visual verification guides, including the NewsCheck resources, showed journalists how to verify the authenticity of online images and video, and it launched an online verification course. The organisation ran in-person events and workshops for its partner network, hosted the multidisciplinary MisinfoCon summit on misinformation, and worked with journalism schools around the world to embed best practice in verification into curricula. Its training drew on real case studies of eyewitness media, from breaking-news footage to viral photographs, and emphasised the ethics of using material from the social web.
The Harvard years and the move away
In October 2017 First Draft moved to the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, a move presented as a natural fit given elections' status as prime targets for disinformation agents. The Harvard association lasted just over a year: in February 2019 it was reported that First Draft had left Harvard following what was described as a series of miscommunications. The organisation continued as an independent entity, later that year taking part in a Trusted News Conference convened by the BBC in response to alleged systemic disinformation during the 2019 Indian general election, and becoming a founding member of the BBC-led Trusted News Initiative, which formally launched in September 2019.
Elections and political advertising work
First Draft remained active in election-related research through its final years. During the 2019 UK general election campaign it analysed political advertising on Facebook, finding that 88 per cent of Conservative ads sampled in early December contained or linked to claims challenged by the fact-checking organisation Full Fact, a finding reported by the BBC and examined by Channel 4 News FactCheck. It worked with Full Fact during the 2017 UK general election as well, monitoring and identifying news items and sources to verify them for the public and the news media. The organisation also investigated misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, producing research on the spread of false health claims.
Closure and legacy
In June 2022 First Draft announced that it would be shutting down, with its mission continuing at the Information Futures Lab at the Brown University School of Public Health. Its website was archived and is hosted in perpetuity by the Internet Archive, an organisation with which First Draft had partnered since 2017. The closure marked the end of a seven-year run during which the project helped define modern newsroom verification practice: its CrossCheck model of multi-newsroom collaboration influenced subsequent election integrity initiatives, its taxonomy gave the industry a shared vocabulary for describing information disorder, and its training materials continued to circulate in journalism schools and newsrooms after the organisation itself had closed. Its partner network model, bringing rival publishers and the major social platforms into a single collaborative framework, remains one of the most ambitious experiments in collective fact-checking attempted in the digital news era.
