Sourcing news from social networks
January 22, 2010 at 11:22 am Shan Robins 3 comments
by Sharon Robins
Early January, Pirate FM were investigating and reporting on a story that I understand came to them via Facebook.
Just before Christmas 2009, a Cornish couple were told they had to remove the teddy bear from the grave of their son Harry who died in 2002 only 13 days old. The teddy had been at the grave with Harry all these years.
The couple set up a facebook page with, at that time, nearly 40,000 people signed up to the page to highlight what happened.
The Pirate FM news team verified the story, did interviews and broadcast the situation.
It all ended well, as reported online by BBC Cornwall.
Risk versus Verification
One of my concerns with news gathering from social media was verifying the truth; how do you know it’s true? When information is being fed in, rather than sourced by a journalist, surely there’s greater risk of being wrong.
Head of News for Pirate FM, Tristan Hunkin essentially said, it doesn’t matter as long as you tell the public the source. So; “bla, bla, bla from face book” thus allowing the listener to decide for themselves if they believe or take it with a pinch of salt.
If you don’t get that news out there immediately then the public will already have heard or read it from someone else anyway.
(AUDIO of Full Interview with Tristan Hunkin to follow, if not I’ll transcribe it and post it)
And another thing, writing from the News Re-Wired conference on One Man and His Blog, Adam Tinworth had the same conclusion as Tristan Hunkin but from the crowd source view;
“If we choose to ignore it, we lose attention and influence to other places where people can do their individual acts of journalism.”
Entry filed under: Summaries. Tags: Citizen Journalism, crowd sourcing, Facebook, news risk.
3 Comments Add your own
Leave a comment
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
smile2010.wordpress.com 
1.
georgetomlinson | March 3, 2010 at 6:38 pm
It’s interesting that accurate reporting isn’t the main priority for some reporters. And, I think, sad and quite worrying in many ways. On the Impartiality blog I made a comment on one of Cecilia’s posts about how news can seem to become a competition between broadcasters:
I think it really questions the integrity of broadcasters if they’re happy to run with a story regardless of whether they know it’s true, just to get it out there before anyone else. I wonder whether we, the audience, have created this ourselves? We’re so impatient these days and have little time to sit a read in-depth stories – we want news and we want it now. Hence the rise in social media being used as a news output. It’s fast, and regardless of accuracy, gets the story out there in a matter of seconds. And maybe broadcasters feel they need to operate on an “if you snooze you lose” basis!
I definitely share your concern in gathering news from social media due to the difficulties in verifying the truth of a story. There was an article in The Sun a while back:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/2826153/Sick-Facebook-imposter-targets-dead-troops-families.html
Basically a guy set up a Facebook page pretending to be a soldier who’d fought in Afghanistan and befriended the loved ones of those who had died during the conflict. He even, after creating a second “soldier”, faked his “own” death.
It’s so easy to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts these days where you can essentially create your own news, as this story demonstrates. In terms of your question – what impact social media’s having on established news output – it’s certainly speeding up the rate at which news can be broadcast, but there’s also a danger that it’s compromising output quality.
2.
Iain | March 19, 2010 at 12:18 pm
If you do attribute stories to Facebook, in my eyes you might as well say “…from some guy in the pub.” Even if the story came from Facebook, do some research! It makes the story seem more credible.
3.
Jason Edwards | March 21, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I think there is a balance to kept. This is a prime example of how PirateFM is using social media to collect and gather news – it demonstrates that, in this case Facebook, can be a reliable and informative source of news.
I agree with Iain…if broadcasters are going to take a story directly from Facebook, the source should be second-checked by a trained professional journalist. Attributing the source to the audience is good, but (in my view) any trustworthy news provider will always double-check their sources anyway.
As George points out above, the man who pretended to be a soldier and befriended the loved ones who had lost a relative in war is an example of how social media can be inaccurate and supports the view to always check your sources! (in particular social media that can be more unreliable). For me, accurate news is more important than being first.
Jason