10 Years Ago This Week: Authenticating Eyewitness Reports with First Draft

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending June 20, 2015.

In June 2015 the First Draft Coalition launched, with support from Google and and news organizations. 

First Draft Connected Journalists and Misinformation Researchers

First Draft on Medium, June 2015

By 2015 smartphones were common, at least in the US. Most adults carried a camera with video recording in their pocket or purse all the time. 

That meant there were more eyewitness photos and video of unfolding events than ever before. 

The First Draft Coalition was a group of “thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media, and how to consider the ethics of using it in news reporting”. They also helped coordinate sharing information between journalists, fact-checking organizations and academics.

This was supported by the new Google News Lab, which launched to innovate at the intersection of media and technology. 

First Draft was one of three citizen video projects supported at the launch of Google News Lab. Another eyewitness video project, WITNESS Media Lab, continues today. Google also launched YouTube Newswire, a curated feed of newsworthy eyewitness videos, which stopped being updated in 2017.

The founding members of the First Draft Coalition Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, First Look Media's Reported.ly, Meedan, Emergent, SAM Desk, and Verification Junkie. (Only half of those still exist today).

Over the years First Draft received additional funding from the Facebook Journalism Project (now defunct), Twitter and other organizations.

The View from 2025

First Draft resources in 2025 (hosted by Internet Archive)

The First Draft project shut down seven years later, in June 2022, after a short stint as part of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Over the years they fact-checked elections, published research on the spread of misinformation, created a course on covering COVID for journalists, and 

Their mission has continued at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University.

Here's the cool thing: the Internet Archive stepped up and is hosting the First Draft News website in perpetuity. 

That means you can still access their research and training courses for investigating misinformation. It’s a bit out of date, of course, but still useful.

Here in 2025 journalists are leaving newspapers and newsrooms, due to layoffs, or just to strike out on their own, which means they have fewer resources. Meta and X no longer fact check or label misinformation, having shifted to user-submitted (and rarely seen) notes. And generative AI is getting better at making realistic-looking photos and videos. 

I feel like we need this more than ever today. 

References

First Draft History

First Draft Footnotes, 18 June 2015: Introducing the First Draft Coalition

Harvard Kennedy School, 3 October 2017: First Draft joins the Shorenstein Center

First Draft Footnotes, 14 June 2022: Updated from First Draft Executive Director Claire Wardle (shutting down the project)