Paper:
Brandtzaeg, P. B., Lüders, M., Spangenberg, J., Rath-Wiggins, L., & Følstad, A. (2016). Emerging Journalistic Verification Practices Concerning Social Media. Journalism Practice, 10(3), 323–342.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2015.1020331
Discussion Leader: Md Momen Bhuiyan
Summary:
Social media contents have recently been used widely as a primary source of news. In United States 49 percent of the people get breaking news from social media. One study found that 96 percent of the UK journalists use social media everyday. This paper tries to characterize journalistic values, needs and practices concerning the verification process of social media content and sources. Major contribution of this paper is the requirement analysis from a user perspective for the verification of social media content.
The authors use a qualitative approach to find answers to several questions like how journalists identify contributor, how they verify content and what the obstacles for verification are. By interviewing 24 journalists working with social media in major news organizations in Europe they divided verification practices into five categories. Firstly, if a content is published by a trusted source like popular news organization, Police, fire department, politician, celebrity etc. , they are usually considered reliable. Secondly, journalists use social media to get in touch with eyewitnesses. The reliability of the eyewitness is verified by checking if a trusted organization follows him and by their previous record. They also have to check if there are conflicting stories. However, journalists prefer to use traditional methods like direct contact with people. Furthermore, for multimodal contents like text, picture, audio, video etc. they usually use different tools like Google, NameChecker, Google Reverse Image Search, TinEye, Google Maps, Streetview etc. But they have huge gap in knowledge about these tools. Finally if they cannot verify a content they use workaround like disclaimers.
By looking into user group characteristics of the journalists and their context the authors find several potential user requirements for verification tools. They need efficient and easy to use tool to verify content. It has to organize huge amount of data and make sense of them. They also need it to be integrated into their current workflow. The tool need to offer high-speed verification and publication and accessibility from different types of devices. Another requirement is that the journalists need to understand how verification takes place. Furthermore, it needs to support verification of multimodal contents.
Finally the authors discuss limitations for both the study sample and findings. In spite of limitations this study provides a valuable basis for requirement for verification process of social media content.
Reflection:
Although the study made good contribution regarding requirements of verification tools for news organizations, it has several short comings. The study sample was taken from several countries and several organizations, but they don’t include any major organizations. Which begs the question how does major organizations like BBC, CNN, AP, Reuters verify social media contents? How do they define trusted sources? How do they follow private citizen?
The study also doesn’t make much comparison between younger and older journalists and how thier verification process differs. It was noted that young and female journalists have better experience with technologies. But the study doesn’t look if there are differences in thier respective verification process. All in all, further research is necessary to address these question.
Questions:
1. Can verification tools help gain public trust in news media?
2. What are the limitations of verification tools for multimodal content?
3. Can AI automate verification process?
4. Can journalism be replaced by AI?
