![]() ![]() When Chris Harper-Mercer began shooting students and staff at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon on October 1st, tweets from eyewitnesses were vital in getting the news out. They have verification skills of their own and they need to know that we can do the same.” ‘Omg there’s someone shooting on campus’ Our audience are going out looking for this, they know where to find it, they are on their computers at work, on their iPad in front of the TV. “Transparency is key here and that comes back to sustainability. “We should start thinking about ‘this photo/video/information has been verified based on…’,” Bell gave as an example. Then it’s simply a matter of being honest with audiences about the process. ![]() Trust was a huge factor among focus groups when in recent research from Eyewitness Media Hub into audience attitudes to online news and verification practices, and one group in particular summed up the problem:Ĭhris: It screams of, like, zero quality control if you just put anything on the TV and go ‘There you go, that might be true’.ĭawn: I see them as professionals and I want them to do a job, and if they’re not delivering, then I’m not interested.Īs Bell put it: “What is the value of a disclaimer, except to hide behind?”īuilding a clear workflow around newsgathering and online verification is the first step, and understanding the steps and tools necessary in verification. These kind of disclaimers aren’t good enough though, said Bell, especially when audiences know how and where to find the same information themselves. It has become common in the news industry to see disclaimers attached to pictures or videos found on social media when they have not been verified fully. It’s really important to the future of the industry.” ‘This photo could not be independently verified…’įrom Eyewitness Media Hub’s research into audience attitudes to news organisations using eyewitness media “We have to do it right or we’re going to turn off our audience. More and more content is produced everyday. “How do we keep this content coming to us in the future? We need it and we need it more. “User-generated content, ethics, the best practice for UGC and the way we are working in social newsgathering, for me, is all about sustainability,” said Bell. While audience development teams and social media editors focus on engaging their readers in published material, a large part of the modern newsroom is now focussed on finding stories and sources on social media, among the crowd in the digital square.īut there is a public backlash against this newsgathering process, in more ways than one. “So much time, so many resources, conferences and handbooks are focussed on engagement policy for social media, how to tweet the right thing from a brand account,” said Fergus Bell, co-founder of the Online News Association’s UGC Ethics Initiative, at a recent news:rewired event. The self-proclaimed purpose of journalists and news organisations is to be the best source of information and truth for their readers, guiding their audience through an online crowd that gets bigger and noisier by the day. And there are normal people talking about their lives. There are politicians begging for trust and votes on their soapboxes there are merchants pitching and selling from their stalls demagogues, iconoclasts and soothsayers preaching to the multitudes. Social media is the digital town square where the human race now meet, converse and find information. And as mobile technology and internet accessibility spreads further around the world, these numbers are only going to increase. The number of mobile devices has outnumbered global population for over a year now. There are now more active social media accounts than there are people in the world. ![]()
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