Social media as a trustworthy news source: Exploring journalists’ working practices concerning social media

REVEAL Project: Co-funded by the EU FP7 Programme Nr.: 610928 www.revealproject.eu © 2013 REVEAL consortium
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Social media as a trustworthy news source: Exploring
journalists’ working practices concerning social media
Petter Bae Brandtzæg, Marika Lüders, Jochen Spangenberg*, Linda Rath-Wiggins*
& Asbjørn Følstad
SINTEF, Oslo & Deutsche Welle*, Bonn/Berlin
ISMI'14, Oslo 25.04.14
Petter.b.brandtzag@sintef.no

REVEAL Project: Co-funded by the EU FP7 Programme Nr.: 610928 www.revealproject.eu © 2014 REVEAL consortium 1
2013-2016

REVEAL aims to….
advance the necessary technologies for
making a higher level analysis of social media
possible, thus enabling users to reveal hidden
‘modalities’ such as reputation, influence or
credibility of information.

Social media are changing journalism
The majority of journalists use social media
(96% in UK, Social Journalism Study 2013, UK)

Verification of social media content is challenging
4
Social media brings new opportunities, but is often difficult to determine the
truth, accuracy, or validity of content and sources……..

1#Social media are part of the "information war"
Content in social media, such as videos, photos, Twitter updates and blogs
are all new kinds of ammo in this war (e.g. interests groups, agenda setting)
Egypt
Syria
Iran
Ukraina

6
Typical working practices
Monitoring Twitter continuously throughout the day.
Tweetdeck with several columns: feed from followings, mentions, searches on selected news-
cases.
Journalists who do not tweet much, still constantly monitor. Twitter, more important as news-
source rather than a publication channel.
2# Information overload in social media

#3 Different modalities
7

4# Trade-offs: verification vs. fast-paced publishing
8
Real-time breaking news Verification of content
"if speed is the currency of the modern information era, misinformation is the increasingly high cost" (Wood, 2013).
Social media are speeding up publishing

Research question and method
9
What characterizes emerging journalistic practices concerning
the verification of social media content and sources?
24 semi-structured interviews with journalists (early adaptors of social
media) between January and February 2014. To increase the breadth
of the data collection, the interviewees were based in different
European countries. The sample included 18 men and 6 women
14 7 1 1 1

Findings
10
Five practices among social media journalists:
1. Trusted sources
2. Access to eyewitnesses and sources
3. Traditional journalistic methods
4. Multimodal verification and verification tools
5. Workaround methods

1# Trusted sources
11
1. Trusted sources
"What we often use is if other media
have also used it. If they refer to the
same. It's not a guarantee, but often
gives a hint, like, yesterday BBC and
New York Times and others referred to
the same tweets. That could be an
indication that they also consider it
accurate, but of course everyone could
go into the same trap."

Social media as a "primary" news source
12
Trusted sources are important as, the first stage in a news-production process has
been reversed:
”
"Before, we often called people, to find out whether anything had happened. Not many
years ago, you took the initiative. But now, the opposite is the case because you often get
information from Twitter or other places. I work a lot with the police and the justice-system,
and it has changed, social media is now the place where you first get access to
information. (...) The foundation for what you produce news-stories on is really from social
media."o a much larger extent now come to you. In a rather large volume.”

2# Access to eyewitnesses and sources
13
1. Trusted sources
"Often, it can be as simple as, well just
making searches in Google and
Facebook, and check out whether the
person concerned is who he presents
himself as."
"The first time I can remember to have
used social media very actively in a big
incident was the Virginia Tech massacre
in 2007. I looked at different student-
profiles at the school and sent requests
to those students who seemed to have
been there when it happened. We had
several eyewitnesses, via Facebook.
We were directly in touch with
eyewitnesses."
Photo: Brett Weinstein (CC): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/471661031

Social media as "world wide" news source
14
"Journalists have become better at looking beyond their own neighbourhood. The
distance to some village in Pakistan is shorter than it was five years ago."

3# Traditional journalistic methods
15
1. Trusted sources
"Regular journalistic criteria are still
working, right. Like if there is a tweet
about a plane having crashed in Bergen,
we don't report it, we call the rescue
coordination center and the police,
right. Social media content are managed
the same way as regular news tips that
are called in to us. Everything has to be
checked and confirmed."

4# Multimodal verification and tools
16
1. Trusted sources
"Did we also publish it? Oh yes, we did, "Here,
the miracle-toddler is rescued." We included the
same disclaimer, "apparently a toodler in the
ruins". (...) It was uploaded to YouTube on
22.01, we picked it up at once, and published it
on the 25th."

5# Workaround methods
17
1. Trusted sources
"But we take reservations. For
example, we write that they
supposedly claimed this and that
(…)You can always include
disclaimers. We do that often"
"One challenge, and particularly with
photos. Like with text, you can always
include disclaimers. But when you use a
photo or video, they need to be
absolutely confirmed. (...) If you publish
a photo of a large explosion, you need to
be sure this is the right place."

Main challenges
18
User challenges: Journalists vary in their competence in respect to social media, and
are often making use of manually and time consuming verification practices.
Contextual challenges: Increased expectations to high-speed publishing, growing
amount of content and more multimodal content in social media.
”The most important thing is to produce results as quickly as
possible, and to hope for the best”

Innovation in social media verification?
19
User requirements: A verification tool that should enable…
- easy and efficient way to verify social media content
(in particular important for video and photos)
- a tool integrated with applications journalists already use
(e.g. Twitter).
- enable identification of, and contact to prime sources/contributors
- organize and make sense of a huge amounts of content
- provide a clear understanding of how the verification is
taking place (what is behind the algorithm)

Thanks
http://revealproject.eu/

Social media as a trustworthy news source: Exploring journalists’ working practices concerning social media

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