Nowadays, a lot of information (both accurate and false) is being shared on Social Media. The Social Web is a goldmine full of opportunities for journalist’s to find stories if used correctly. Knowing how to navigate through tons of information and filter the right one to reach real, faultless, stories is an essential skill for the journalists of the present.

1. HOW TO FIND STORIES
BY NEWSGATHERING
AND MONITORING THE
SOCIAL WEB
B Y J AV I E R J E N N I N G S M O Z O

2. THE IMPORTANCE OF USING SOCIAL
MEDIA
• During the first wave of COVID 19’s pandemic, the use of Social Media
for newsgathering was specially notable since many journalists were
working from their homes and they needed to find sources on the
Internet.
• Nowadays, a lot of information (both accurate and false) is being shared
on Social Media. It is a goldmine, full of opportunities for journalist’s to
find stories if used correctly. Knowing how to navigate through tons of
information and filter the right one to reach real, faultless, stories is an
essential skill for the journalists of the present.

3. FUNDAMENTALS
OF ONLINE
NEWSGATHERING
“It’s all about WHAT
we’re looking for”
Lydia Morrish – Digital Content Producer at First Draft

4. A TWO-PART PROCESS
They feed into each other: finding one will lead to discovering the other, and vice-
versa (the feedback loop)
Online newsgathering is a process of two main parts:
Sources: the people you go to for information
Keywords: key terminology used around the issue
you want to cover

5. LANGUAGE AND KEYWORDS
How do people talk about the issue online:
- It may not be how YOU would talk about it
- It varies depending on the community you
into
- Consider your own biases too
Tips:
- Include misspellings
- Comment sections are a goldmine!
- Use boolean searches (AND, OR, NOT) to
narrow down what you want to search

6. SPREADSHEETS
It’s useful to create a spreadsheet of
keywords: helps to keep track of the
different narratives around the searches
you want to perform. Include keywords
different languages (think of which
languages might be related to the topic).
- Trial and error: some terms do not
return anything relevant to what you’re
looking for.
- Excel sheets: use Google Docs to edit
real time if you work with a team of
people.

7. MAIN SOCIALS
FOR
NEWSGATHERING
• Twitter & Facebook
• Reddit, Instagram & Snapchat can
also be quite useful
Specific monitoring platforms for each
Social Media

8. WHY USE
MONITORING
PLATFORMS?
They help to make more efficient searches in order to
find relevant and interesting information faster when
monitoring Social Media.

9. TWITTER
LISTS FOR
SOURCES
A great way of organizing authoritative accounts on
particular subjects or locations. Some tips:
• Search for other people’s lists to find new sources
(quick Google search using “site.twitter.com/FIL IN
BLANK/lists”).
• Use Twitter List Copy to copy any Twitter list to one
of yours just by adding the URL. It also allows you to
input a specific Twitter handle to check if the user has
a list related to that topic.
• TweetDeck: useful to compile keywords and search
for them simultaneously on different timelines (once
again, use boolean searches and engagement filters
too).
• Followerwonk: a great tool to find experts
(accounts) inside of Twitter to connect with.

10. MONITORING
PLATFORMS
FOR
FACEBOOK
CrowdTangle: Free for journalists. Useful to organise
Facebook pages and groups into lists and to find
sources with boolean search (although it doesn’t
support the typical AND, OR, NOT searches). It also
includes a tool that measures trends (mentions and
interactions) for analysing specific rumours or
narratives and live displays (similar to Tweetdeck).
Some added features and tips:
• Use Linkchecker to find out who is sharing a specific
link (such as a news article) and where (inside
Facebook)?
• Filter by reactions/emotions (sentiment analysis).
• Set alerts (notifications) depending on your search
needs (Google Alerts, for your email, is a similar tool
for this too).

11. MONITORING
ON LIKEDIN
Within the platform itself, two types of useful search
tools:
• People’s search: great way of finding experts or
people who work in specific organizations of your
interest. Search for keywords too.
• Content search: find people who are talking about a
specific topic (use filters to narrow down the
searches).

12. INSTAGRAM
Picbabun: find the most viral hashtags in relation to a
key term and then monitor them. Also helps identify
important or suspicious sources of information by
showing the accounts that are related to it. Allows to
build lists.

13. REDDIT
TrackReddit: search a keyword and it shows on which
post the word has been used. You can identify
relevant communities around the topic of your
through the link offered to the post.

14. SNAPCHAT
Snapmap: monitoring by location (where were the
stories taken). Very useful to see how different
countries are feeling and responding to a certain
topic (sentiment analysis by location).

15. EXTRA TOOLS
& TIPS

16. FIRST DRAFT
BASIC TOOLKIT
• First Draft has created a list of free, easy
to use tools, that can assist you in
newsgathering, monitoring and fact
checking.

17. PRO TIPS FOR
JOURNALISTS
• Find communities that research and discover new tools
and ways of searching for information and tag along them,
stay connected and keep constantly learning.
• Spokio to search for accounts on Social Media linked to a
specific email: it’s challenging because many times the
emails are not public.
• WebHotel to find out who owns the website. There are
other ways of doing it: do a who is search (very limited
lately in Europe due to privacy policies  Use a VPN -
works outside of the EU, there are also plugins to do a
who is search). If the owner didn’t apply some privacy
restrictions it will show you who registered it. Look at the
website’s source code (it gives you clues about when and
how it was setup, and add tracking codes).

18. THE MOST
IMPORTANT TIP!!!
TAKE CARE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH!
• Organise your time for monitoring
• Take breaks at a regular interval and then come
back to it.
• Make sure the list of sources that you are following
for updated content are as small as possible.
• Same for keywords, be as specific as possible.

19. AND… REMEBER!
“Failing to plan is planning to fail”
Fady Ramzy Aziz – Social Media Consultant & Public Speaker

20. KEEP THE WORK UP!