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Inside Breaking News: A look at how we confirm stories in real time
Interesting - via breakingblog:
In the early stages of breaking news, there’s often a tremendous amount of conflicting information. Take this afternoon’s shooting at a psychiatric clinic in Pittsburgh as a prime example. For well over an hour, victim counts varied, and rumors of a second gunman and hostages dominated Twitter and even some media reports.
Here at BreakingNews, we use an internal chat tool — a “backchannel” — to evaluate and confirm updates in real-time.
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Inside Breaking News: 'Thanks for melting our servers, you jerks'
Well done, Breaking News!
via breakingblog:
@BreakingNews Thanks for melting our servers, ya jerks. ^JK
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) February 2, 2012The Atlantic jokingly sent us this tweet today after we sent out their story on the Susan G. Komen foundation. Over the last few months, we’ve noticed that we’re sending…
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7 biggest Breaking News stories of 2011
It goes without saying, but it’s been an incredible news year. Here at BreakingNews, we’ve compiled the biggest breaking stories of the year — the stories that drove the biggest traffic spikes, the most @breakingnews retweets, the fastest stream of updates, the most social media reports and… [read full post]
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Important reminder to be skeptical of what you see/read via social media! Never share or get too excited until you confirm. Kudos to the breakingnews.com team for doing this.
Fake news thriving in social media: This may not come as a big surprise, but our BreakingNews.com team is finding an increasing amount of fake Twitter photos and YouTube clips these days. I’m not talking about The Daily Show and The Onion, but semi-sophisticated efforts to dupe people during breaking stories.
Take the East Coast earthquake, for example. We found a few versions of this video clip (above) claiming to be NYC buildings swaying in the quake. But we recognized that clip from our Japanese earthquake coverage last March — it’s Tokyo, not New York. (If you crank up the volume, you can hear people speaking in Japanese.)
Then there were all the claims that the Washington Monument was leaning after the quake (it’s not), fueled in part by a news report quoting a DC police officer. Twitter went crazy with the rumor for a couple hours, but we held off.
And one of the most hilarious “damage” photos to come out of the quake — the lawn chair that fell over in someone’s backyard — turns out to be a regurgitated Flickr photo from 2010. The pic has been passed around Twitter more times than just about any other earthquake photo, but again, not quite true.
Fake clips and photos are appearing faster than ever before — sometimes minutes after a story breaks — making our jobs more challenging than ever. It helps that we’re searching YouTube, Twitpic and other services on a daily basis, and our institutional memory catches a lot of fakes. We also take several steps to verify photos and video (time, place, originating user, history, etc.), and when in doubt, we reach out to the photographer. If we happen to be wrong, we immediately post a correction.
Overall, it underscores the value of BreakingNews as a real-time verification service for social media. Twitter and YouTube are unprecedented sources of news — but sometimes, you just don’t know what to believe. -
"Breaking News: A New Opportunity"
Congrats, Lauren!
Sharing some personal news: I’m excited to announce that I will be joining the Breaking News team at MSNBC.com. Breaking News is at the forefront of digital journalism, using social media and the crowd to curate and share real-time information.
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Love this!
How we discover breaking photos and video: More often these days, when breaking stories strike, observers at the scene capture the news before the media arrives. That was the case on Friday night when a tornado tore through the St. Louis Airport. Many travelers pointed their cell phones at the storm, snapping and sharing amazing photos and video, like the dramatic clip above from Jayipatel on YouTube.
When we first heard about the tornado, our Breaking News team began scouring social media for the first photos and video from the scene, which we posted here as soon as we discovered them. We use this social search tool — which anyone can use on BreakingNews.com to spot stories — to search simultaneously across YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic, Plixi and yFrog. We found some amazing early photos, including this Twitpic snapped by Elizabeth Rastberger of an airport van dangling from an elevated roadway.
