What’s (Really) Up?

Making sense of breaking (and faking) news in a digital world

A WORKSHOP, April 1, 2018

We swipe, click, switch, flip and surf, following updates, checking alerts and reading forwarded messages. News is everywhere, on every device, all the time. In this hyper-connected news environment, it can be difficult to figure out what is true and what is simply hype, what is fact and what is opinion.

This two-hour interactive workshopwill explore the dynamics of news production, and offer some ideas and tools to sift through the clutter and get to the real stuff. Using current examples and experiences, we will try to answer these and other questions—

1. How do the news media really work?
   

2. Who (and what) decides what’s news?
   

3. How do we tell the difference between fact and opinion?
   

4. What goes into the making of a good news story and how can we identify it?
   

5. What ethical concerns about the news media should we have as citizens?
   

6. What alternatives do we have to the big media?
   

The 2-hour workshop to be conducted by Professors Vinod Pavarala, Usha Raman, and Kanchan K. Malik from the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad is directed toward college and high school students and young professionals.