A Toolkit:Eight Tactics for the Digital Foreign Correspondent
Since the earliest days of journalism, new technologies have periodically changed reporting, accelerating how we transmit information. (Think the telegraph, telex, telephone, and satellite transmission.) Digital technologies have changed the speed equation yet again, bringing new benefits and challenges.
As we’ve witnessed in the last few years, speedier transmission pushes some journalists to prioritize being first–over being accurate–with the aim of scoring an exclusive story. “It’s more difficult to verify what’s true and what may be shockingly false,” wrote CNN in a 2009 article about false social media reports of celebrity deaths.6 This was nearly four years before CNN and other major U.S. news organizations rushed to break “news” in the Boston Marathon bombing, only to learn the sources they relied upon were wrong.7
Perhaps the most profound impact on reporting is the opportunity that digital technologies give to people everywhere to commit “random acts of journalism,” as former NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin put it. Anyone who witnesses a breaking news event can, with the right digital tools and Internet access, report on it instantly to the world. With all the firsthand information flooding onto YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms, the question of where this leaves professional journalists is one we deal with daily. Internationally, it gives correspondents more potential sources than ever before. It also demands that they take greater responsibility for verifying their reporting, for being transparent about their newsgathering techniques, and for correcting their mistakes. What follows are eight tactics–all based on traditional reporting principles but adapted to new technology–to help the foreign correspondent remain reliable, trustworthy, and authoritative in the digital age.
Finding Sources
When I began working at NPR in the summer of 2011, we were several months into a series of popular uprisings in the Middle East. Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled his country in January, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February. By the time I arrived, NPR’s senior strategist, Andy Carvin, had already made a name for himself as a pioneer using social media to cover these uprisings. “The man who tweeted the revolution,” The Guardian called him.8 Columbia Journalism Review described Carvin as “a living, breathing real-time verification system.”9
What garnered him all the attention was that Carvin was not a traditional foreign correspondent sending news directly from Tahrir Square, but a Twitter maven who did his reporting from NPR’s D.C. headquarters. Carvin didn’t replace NPR’s on-the-ground correspondents, of course, but his work complemented theirs. And he showed that it was possible, perhaps for the first time, to do serious reporting on a revolution without actually being there.
My job was to assist in this novel form of journalism as we sought to cover new crises in that Arab Spring. Another uprising had begun in Syria in March. By the summer of 2011, what had started as peaceful protest was descending into an increasingly bloody civil war. The Syrian regime made it almost impossible for foreign correspondents to enter the country, but the mounting death toll and huge political implications meant that the story could not be ignored. I was tasked with covering it, without leaving NPR’s offices, just as Carvin had covered Tunisia and Egypt.
Despite the regime’s restrictions, social media and the Internet were awash in videos, photos, and reports of events happening inside Syria. Most came from activists or ordinary citizens who opposed the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was clear their reports could not merely be taken at face value. I had to figure out which sources were supplying reliable information–verifiable images and accurate descriptions of what was going on thousands of miles and several time zones to the east of where I was working. As with any beat, the first step was to learn all I could–to read widely about the conflict and Syrian history, making note of the names and roles of newsmakers, and talking to a range of people with expertise on Syria and how the conflict was unfolding. I began with a community I already knew: Syrian bloggers and activists, whom I had come to know in the mid-2000s when I created an English-language blog, Saudi Jeans, in Saudi Arabia. At that time, blogging was just taking off in the Middle East and we were a small band of Arab writers who quickly became acquainted–first online, and later in person at conferences across the region and abroad.
There were only a handful of Syrian bloggers, and those I knew were critical of the regime; in fact, as their blogging put them at increased risk of arrest, most were forced to leave the country.
I reached out to these writers, and our early conversations helped me understand the Syrian protests and pointed me to other sources of reliable reporting. Social networks, particularly Twitter, had become popular, and by following and engaging with people deeply immersed in the story, I could keep up to date with developments and their significance.
But if you don’t start out with a network of contacts, as I did, how do you find sources and determine their reliability? There are several reporting techniques and tools that can help.