It’s going to be a busy summer at the International Fact-Checking Network headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. Daniela Flamini recently graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in international comparative studies and spent several months researching fact-checking. She will join the network’s staff for 10 weeks as an intern and is ready to produce special content for the IFCN’s website and its social media.
Flamini will focus on misinformation regulation attempts around the world, and she’ll also be reporting on Global Fact 6, this year’s annual international fact-checking summit in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference will reunite more than 200 fact-checkers from June 18-21, and Flamini will tell their stories.
Flamini, who worked as a research assistant at the Duke Reporters’ Lab and wrote her senior dissertation on her experience with the Argentinean fact-checking platform Chequeado, was chosen among over 80 applicants. In her cover letter, she expressed interest in “the potential that fact-checking has to disrupt the hegemony of traditional media and educate news consumers in a meaningful way.”
In June of 2018, Flamini went to Global Fact 5, in Rome, Italy, and had the opportunity to meet the international fact-checking community. Since then, she has engaged with the group through her work and helped maintain the Duke Reporter’s Lab Fact-Checker Database.
That same summer, Flamini spent two months in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working full-time as an intern at Chequeado. She worked on projects with their team, interviewed their reporters, editors and directors, and explored the city’s media environment and its relationship to the fact-checking initiative. This research served as the basis for her interdisciplinary thesis, “Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Journalistic Struggle Over Truth,” which was awarded highest honors at her graduation from Duke.
“Daniela Flamini has shown a tremendous intelligence on fact-checking throughout her studies, enriched with experiences at the Duke Reporters’ Lab and observing the fact-checking ecosystem in Latin America. Her addition to IFCN will help the network monitor the international regulation attempts on misinformation,” said Baybars Orsek, IFCN’s director.
Flamini is fluent in Spanish and has also studied Arabic for three years.
“I’m so grateful for this opportunity to continue to research and write about what has become one of my greatest passions over the last few years, journalism and fact-checking, from a new angle,” Flamini said.
