A key issue facing journalists on a daily basis when working on any platform is how to verify information they are receiving. When it comes to working online the need to verify content shared on social media and other forms of user generated content sumbitted online remains just as important.
At news:rewired – full stream ahead on Friday 13 July one of our sessions will take a dedicated look at verifying content online and how to responsibly handle rumour circulating on social media, such as in breaking news situations, and issue corrections in a networked environment.
Experts on the panel will include founder of the Regret the Error blog in the US Craig Silverman and BreakingNews.com UK editor David Wyllie. More speaker details are still due to be announced for this session.
This post offers a useful starting point for those planning on attending this session, with links to some useful guides to verification and corrections aimed at digital journalists and related posts offering some talking points around the subject.
Lists, tips and guides:
- On the Journalism.co.uk website we collected together the advice of experts in this area in a podcast: Advice on verifying social media content and correcting errors which offers a handful of techniques and tools
- Journalism.co.uk also compiled a feature outlining the different advice and skills shared by the experts in research for the podcast: How to: verify content from social media
- Online journalism expert and academic Paul Bradshaw, outlines more advice on his Online Journalism Blog: Content, context and code: verifying information online
- ‘news:rewired – full stream ahead’ speaker Craig Silverman , shares his Best Practices for Social Media Verification on the Columbia Journalism Review
Talking points and related discussions
- On the Media Standards Trust website Gavin Freeguard gives a summary of a discussion around the role of crowdsourcing in verification: Crowdsourcing, verification and ‘alpha users’
- The BBC College of Journalism website has a number of posts based on the topic of verification, including How journalists can end up spreading rumours on social media, by Neal Mann
- Last year Alex Murray discussed the BBC’s verification process: #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social media content and Fergus Bell explained why Social media is no excuse for different standards of journalism
- In this video from TED the Guardian’s Paul Lewis discusses crowdsourcing to verify news
- And US journalism academic Alfred Hermida shares details of his Twitter and verification paper published in Journalism Practice at this link
