Eight Tactics for the Digital Foreign Correspondent

During the 2011 Arab uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, the way we learned about and reported on international events was upended. Alongside the CNN cameras shooting from roofs of hotels, citizens were tweeting, posting video to YouTube, and organizing on Facebook. All this information presented enormous challenges: how to make sense of it, and whose reporting could you trust?

To Andy Carvin, at the time a senior product manager for online communities at NPR, these twin problems of context and trust sounded a lot like an opportunity for good journalism. Using traditional values and practices, he set out to monitor the digital information flow and separate fact from rumor and speculation. In doing so, he and his team–including Saudi journalist Ahmed Al Omran–developed practices for verifying sources, making corrections, and dealing with anonymity on social media.

Al Omran, now a correspondent in the Wall Street Journal’s Saudi Arabia bureau, outlines eight tactics for journalists who want to mine social media and other digital sources for international reporting.