Storyful: Applying “traditional journalistic skills” in new ways to verify news from social media

Here’s a good feature on NPR about the verification company Storyful.

In both a text and audio story, David Folkenflik tells the story of how Storyful works:

The company is constituted of a team of several dozen digitally savvy journalists operating around the clock in Dublin, New York City and Hong Kong to identify and acquire material from social media platforms for their clients — and to authenticate that content so it can be trusted for use in print. Storyful is scarcely known by the wider public — and highly regarded by digital journalists.

How It Works

Storyful’s editors rely on a “heat map” of traffic on a variety of social media platforms from users previously designated as credible to trigger awareness of incidents as they occur. They then pull down video, audio, text and images and try to authenticate that material, and send continuous updates to clients who are seeking information about that story.

What strikes me about this story is the way it shows how people are using journalism skills to make a living in ways they probably didn’t even imagine when they were learning those skills:

On any given story, editors might run down the origins of dialects on tape, use metadata to figure out when a picture was really uploaded or check Google Earth to study terrain shown in videos. They compare weather conditions shown in a video against meteorological statistics for the day that it supposedly shows and call up shipping registries about stories that involve tankers.

“What I’m doing is applying … traditional journalistic skills to a new medium,” Megan Specia, then a duty editor for Storyful, told me recently at the company’s New York offices.

This is one of those stories I file away to pull out and look at any time I start to feel anxious about the future for people with those skills.