What is the future of news? Bleak, probably.

A Q&A with Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com.

Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes.com, a website dedicated to debunking bogus stories, Internet rumors, and malignant falsehoods. Snopes has done the thankless work of online fact-checking since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the site has seen its traffic spike by 85 percent over the past year. The conventional view is that social media is the main culprit in terms of spreading misinformation online. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg was compelled recently to address Facebook’s role in disseminating “fake news.” Binkowski, who worked for many years as a reporter for CNN, has a slightly different take. For her part, social media is the low-hanging fruit in this discussion. The real problem is the collapse of faith in media as a trusted and credible institution.