When it comes to breaking news events, many people are willing to overlook the fact that some of the reports they are getting might not be verified or 100-percent accurate, in return for the immediacy and authenticity that comes with a report from someone close to the action
Everyone complains about how social media is full of hoaxes and inaccuracies in the aftermath of a breaking-news event like the shooting down of Malaysian Flight MH17, but we all have the ability to fact-check the news. Here are some resources to do so
British blogger Brown Moses, also known as Eliot Higgins, has become a leading source of fact-checked information about military activity in Syria and elsewhere, despite having no journalistic training. And now he wants to bring those skills to others through a site called Bellingcat.
Reddit is beta testing a new feature that allows users to create and update live blogs about breaking news events such as the recent uprising in Ukraine or the war in Syria — a move that could be a valuable addition to the cause of “open-source journalism”
News Corp.’s acquisition of Storyful for $25 million is a sign of how important user-generated content has become, so I spoke with Raju Narisetti of News Corp. and Storyful founder Mark Little about their reasons for doing the deal
Real-time verification of breaking news increasingly involves the use of crowdsourcing and other social tools, and both Storyful and Reddit’s Syrian civil war forum are good examples of how to do it properly and effectively
Using a Google+ group and an open Twitter account, Storyful is trying to build a crowdsourced “open newsroom” that can help verify user-generated content in real time during events like the war in Syria.
Social platforms like YouTube have become a rich source of “citizen journalism” about breaking news events, but media outlets don’t always provide credit. Mark Little of Storyful wants to try and change that with a public license for video news.
As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process.
As the BBC and other mainstream media outlets try to figure out how to curate and make sense of the “citizen journalism” coming in via social media, they also need to come to grips with the idea that news is now a process, not a product.
