Jessica Weiss
With
more than 2 billion people actively using social media each month, its
stake in journalism is a no-brainer.
Though
Facebook makes up more than half of these users, every instant
messaging, micro-video or networking app that pops up represents a new platform
for telling a story, and newsrooms are taking advantage of that.
Here
are some of the most interesting ways social media was used (and misused) to
cover a few of the biggest news events of 2014.
The
World Cup
Journalists
covering the biggest social media event ever were active on Twitter, using it to report on both the sports
and stats as well as the surrounding social commentary and goings-on in Brazil.
As
part of their coverage, AP photojournalists throughout Brazil used
Instagram to highlight “offbeat, behind the scenes views of soccer’s
premier event.”
Fusion,
a news and entertainment cable network focused on millennials, used
live-blogging as well as the “honeycomb,” a social aggregator built on Fusion’s soccer site that
allowed them to surface social media content based on location and influence.
For this coverage, two to three Fusion editors at a time mined and tracked all
12 stadiums where the tournament took place based on certain key elements like
hashtags and the influence of people in the stadium, IJNet reported back in October.
Some journalists also used social media data to inspire and inform stories. For
instance, during the United States-Germany game, journalist Reuben Fischer-Baum
wrote about how “Nazi” was used over 30,000 times on Twitter, especially in the
minutes surrounding a goal from Germany.
This proved that “stereotypes are
common crutches when it comes to trash talk,” CJR wrote, adding: “It will be interesting to see how
social media data develops as a real-time source to explain people’s behavior
with regard to sports and beyond.”
Ebola
In
July, journalists around the world began scrambling to cover the deadliest
Ebola outbreak in history. This has been a challenge not just for the deluge of
misinformation that has circulated on social media, but also because of a
slow and minimal social media presence in locations where the outbreak is
strongest.
In
addition to public health sites like WHO, BBC Africa was a strong Twitter
influencer on Ebola, according to data from health care social media
analyzer Symplur. The BBC also launched an Ebola public health information
service on WhatsApp, aimed at users of the service in West Africa. The service
provided “audio, text message alerts and images to help people get the latest
public health information to combat the spread of Ebola in the region,” according
to the BBC.
From
Sierra Leone, The Guardian’s Channel 4 News Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson made news
after his Vines showed snapshots of the situation, which packed an
emotional punch despite their short length.
“Just as the tweet is the
boiled-down version of the blog post, which is the boiled-down version of the
essay, a Vine is the boiled-down version of a TV package, which is a
boiled-down version of a documentary,” Marc Blank-Settle, a mobile journalism
and social media trainer at the BBC College of Journalism, told The Guardian. “The tool itself is brilliantly easy to
use. It’s really leveraging the power of Twitter to share news and information
very quickly.”
Ferguson
Protests
Fusion’s
Director of Media Innovation Tim Pool is the epitome of social
storyteller. Pool, a college dropout, first became known in journalism for
using drones and wearables to live-stream breaking news events, from the Occupy
Wall Street protests in 2011 to demonstrations in the Middle East. His unique
style exists at the intersection of social and mainstream media.
After
protests erupted following a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer
who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in the U.S., Pool was on the
scene for Fusion, as well as publishing content on every major social channel,
including Twitter, Instagram, LiveStream, Vine and YouTube. He used these
channels to bring stories on the ground to his tens of thousands of followers.
While he was covering the protests, Pool even managed to conduct a Reddit AMA (“Ask me Anything”) which garnered almost 600
comments.
Pool
is open about his dislike of the way the mainstream media, or “MSM,” often
covers stories, saying “It's the small stories within the larger story that MSM
misses … They offer this blanket coverage and you miss the most important
moments.”
“I
think the future is for the individual,” Pool wrote. “Newsrooms will have to
adapt to having their channels be a collective and not a single channel.”
Conflict
in Gaza
Opinions
and information flooded social media platforms as Israel's offensive in
Gaza began in July. But social media was also full of an unprecedented
amount of misinformation and bias, creating an “information war,” and a
challenging environment for journalists covering the story.
Analysis
by Abdirahim
Saeed of BBC Arabic found that some of the pictures circulated on the
popular #gazaunderattack
hashtag were recycled images from as long ago as 2007. Some were not even from
Gaza. So media organizations had to use reverse image search tools — that
show if a photo has previously been published online — to determine
the source of pictures, according to Chris Hamilton, social media editor at the BBC.
"Social media is kind of a misinformation accelerant, and at the same
time, it is potentially the best rumor-smashing tool," Craig Silverman,
one of the authors of the Verification Handbook, told the Global Editors
Network in an interview.
In
a conflict in which it is especially difficult for journalists to be unbiased, a few
journalists stood out (and were congratulated) for their fair coverage via
social media. Ayman Mohyeldin, a foreign correspondent for NBC News, was
pulled out of Gaza and then sent back a few days later after a social media
backlash.
His coverage of the conflict earned him the respect of fellow journalists. And the New York Times' Jerusalem
correspondent Jodi Rudoren used her Facebook page to spur discussion
and debate throughout the conflict.
Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH17
In
the immediate aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July
17 by a Buk missile system, journalists and social media experts took to the
Internet to “sleuth” the event themselves in the absence of official
information.
Using
images and videos, Storyful’s Open Newsroom project confirmed members of the Donetsk People’s Republic
separatist militia “at the very least” appeared to have access to an
anti-aircraft missile system capable of an attack like the one carried out on
the plane.
And
Eliot Higgins, the British founder of online journalism site Bellingcat, with the help of
some of his Twitter followers and open source tools, used a YouTube video
to pinpoint the location of a Buk launcher while it was
being transported through a pro-Russian rebel-held town in Ukraine near the
Russian border.
In November, less than four months after the crash, Bellingcat
published a 35-page report outlining “solid information” that the
Buk missile system that downed Malaysian Airlines flight 17 came from
Russia and was sent back there after the disaster. As Mashable wrote, Bellingcat was able to unearth “MH17 intel quicker
than U.S. spies.”
Image
courtesy of Flickr user Ian Clark under a CC License.
Source: http://ijnet.org/
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