Disinformation is a dangerous virus spreading throughout the world, impacting how we think, vote in public elections and how we make government policy. Recognizing the rigorous work of journalists, the importance of verified sources and what makes a good information are the goals of the #ReadTheSources initiative. When you don’t know how your information is made, you can’t tell if it’s good or bad.

The campaign is an invitation by leading international media outlets starting with The Globe and Mail and Society, to look behind the scenes of investigative journalism by revealing  for the very first time the sources used to underpin key stories they have covered. We teamed up with journalists to retrieve all the files, documents, interviews, videos and pictures they used in their investigation articles and we launched a press ad listing all those sources. Each printed ad contained a QR code linking to an experience website where viewers could explore all the sources.

The campaign covered major international topics including:

Canada’s killer heat wave of June 2021, with testimonials of firefighters, paramedics and heat casualties.

Those two publications have made available more than 300 documents, including images, audio recordings, interviews and hundreds of PDF files, through a digital experience available on readthesources.com