Widespread adoption of internet technologies has changed the way that news is created and consumed. The current online news environment is one that incentivizes speed and spectacle in reporting, at the cost of fact‐checking and verification. The line between user generated content and traditional news has also become increasingly blurred. This poster reviews some of the professional and cultural issues surrounding online news and argues for a two‐pronged approach inspired by Hemingway's “automatic crap detector” (Manning, 1965) in order to address these problems: a) proactive public engagement by educators, librarians, and information specialists to promote digital literacy practices; b) the development of automated tools and technologies to assist journalists in vetting, verifying, and fact‐checking, and to assist news readers by filtering and flagging dubious information.