Tactic 3: Use Data Management Tools
On the tools side, creating Twitter lists and filtered searches focused on specific events and beats in apps like TweetDeck can help you follow important stories as they evolve.28
This is essential on busy news days, when events move so quickly that it’s difficult to identify relevant tweets among the flood of information (which can be exacerbated by commercial spammers trying to take advantage of news events for marketing purposes). For example, when anti-government protests began in Ukraine in February of 2014, the news verification startup Storyful posted a list of Twitter accounts to follow to keep up to date with the latest from there. Storyful has similar lists for different countries and beats, from topics like South Africa29 to wildfires.30 A tool that can help assess a Twitter source’s trustworthiness is Twiangulate, a site that allows you to find the common followers of two Twitter users.31 For example, you can compare the followers of a source you already know and trust with the followers of a new source you just found. If the two share many of the same followers, then there is a good chance that the new source is one worth following–though you’ll still want to do additional verification. While following the 2011–2012 protests in Kuwait, for example, I used Twiangulate to cross-reference some new Twitter users I came across before deciding whether to follow or retweet them.32 I used the same method to vet new sources while following the news of protests by the Shia minority in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Once you have found and connected with new sources, contact them via Twitter direct message, communicate with them using IM apps, use Skype to video chat, or call them by mobile phone to talk. I relied on old-fashioned telephone technology when covering Syria because the Internet infrastructure in the country is weak, especially in the hottest conflict zones. In these cases, I used digital media to ask the sources for their phone numbers, then called them and recorded interviews. Later we used some of these audio conversations in NPR broadcasts and on the website.
NPR has advanced equipment to record audio, but new smartphones can get the job done when needed. News organizations can configure apps such as Report-IT to allow their sources to record their end of the interviews and then send the audio via the Internet’s File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Sources can also use an app like DropVox to record sound, and then upload it to Dropbox.
Verifying Information
In April of 2013, the annual Boston Marathon was interrupted when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded, killing three people and injuring over two-hundred and fifty others. In the hours following the attack, a tsunami of news, rumor, and speculation flooded social media as authorities worked to identify suspects.
On the Web, users of the popular online community Reddit led their own crowdsourcing effort to find the suspects. That effort wrongly named two people. One of them, a college student who had disappeared earlier, was eventually found dead in the Providence River. He had no connection whatsoever to the bombing, but Reddit’s mistake ensured that his family suffered through a nasty, hostile media frenzy–a tragic tale and a sober reminder that verification is at the heart of all good journalism, regardless of the information’s source.33
Digital technology has made that especially true during breaking news events, when false information and rumors can travel rapidly and widely. Several tools can help journalists assess what they’re watching and seeing.