Social-media news startup Reported.ly tackles same problems sportswriters often face

Reported.ly is a startup that aims to bring global news to users almost entirely through social media. It’s part of First Look Media and is run by Andy Carvin, who pioneered social-media reporting when he was at NPR.

Here’s a NiemanLab story about how the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris last week was the first big test for the new venture. The Lab’s Justin Ellis describes how the Reported.ly team responded to the initial reports and the developing story.

Over the next 18 hours, Carvin and his small team divvied up the coverage, with an eye towards providing context but also playing to the strengths of certain channels. As Carvin told me, one of the biggest goals of Reported.ly is fitting coverage to the right platform — finding what kinds of storytelling works best on Twitter versus Reddit, for example.

But the work of Reported.ly is more than simple aggregation and amplification. A large part of their work is trying to verify and factcheck reports already circulating …

Though Reported.ly will report on developing stories, don’t expect it to be a breaking news service. The specific focus is on providing context around breaking stories — or, as Browne put it, “organize the chaos. Because social media is chaos.”

On an often smaller, almost always less important scale, this is what sportswriters find themselves doing when news breaks in our world. Verifying, fact-checking and making sense of the reports flying around social media is one of the key services we can provide.

I’m interested to see how Reported.ly evolves. I expect it to be something worth emulating.