On Thursday, I attended the Guardian Activate Summit here in New York. It brought together media and tech thought leaders to discuss how to make the world a better place through the Internet. Here are 10 key takeaways from the event, followed by a more comprehensive overview I put together.
When NBC News first approached me, I was flattered.
Weeks later, after an emotional process, I made the difficult decision to leave The Huffington Post after two years. I delivered the news first to Arianna, who has been amazing through this entire process. I thanked her again for taking time out of her busy schedule, for everything she’s done for me, and for the generous offers to stay at HuffPost. I just ultimately decided it was time to move on. This was an incredible opportunity and new challenge that was too great to pass up. She said she understood. We hugged.
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.
“The Huffington Post received more traffic than the website of The New York Times in May, the first time it has surpassed NYTimes.com in unique visitors, tracking firm comScore said Thursday.
ComScore said HuffingtonPost.com received 35.6 million unique visitors in May, up from 29.9 million the previous month, while NYTimes.com received 33.6 million unique visitors in May, up from 32.9 million the previous month.”
— AFP on an important milestone for HuffPost! Incredibly proud of the whole team & excited for what’s to come.
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.
Just weeks after live blogging NASA announcement’s on a new life form, last night I covered the winter solstice lunar eclipse into the wee hours of the morning. This was the first time a lunar eclipse took place in conjunction with winter solstice since the 1600s, and I curated photos, tweets and video from about 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. The HuffPost community really embraced the coverage and it was a blast. The full live blog is archived here.
Last night, the last of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days was freed, each pulled up via a capsule in a story that has captivated the world the last 48 hours.
It’s been an honor and a privilege to live blog this for The Huffington Post, and it was fun to do so too — SO nice to be writing about good news for a change, as all too often, news in this business isn’t so uplifting. (Also encouraging to see it surge to the No. 1 Most Popular story on HuffPost.)
