Journalistic Use and Verification of Twitter-Sourced Information

Cardiff.
The next session at Future of Journalism 2011 starts with the fabulous Alfred Hermida, whose focus is on the shift of news organisations to digital, networked environments, with specific reference to Twitter. How do journalists find a place in this, and especially, how do they deal with verifying information on those platforms?

Twitter is used for a variety of purposes, of course, and the volume of messages on this platform is immense. This represents the lives, interests, and views of its users – and includes acts of journalism; Twitter can be seen as a platform for ambient journalism, therefore. This challenges established ways of communication for journalism, usually about current things, and it disrupts the way we think about space and time, private and public. For journalists, it disrupts truth (or the pursuit of truth, which they have elevated to their ultimate professional goal): discovering and reporting truth by journalism is seen as essential to the profession.

Verification is central to this mode of knowledge production – but how does it play out in real-time, distributed architectures of communication? We cannot simply apply established approaches to the new environment; there need to be more citizen-oriented models, which reduces journalists’ special authority in this context. There is a consequent shift from individual, institutionalised intelligence to collective intelligence, therefore.

How do journalists think about this more collaborative approach to communication – which needs to be seen as an iterative, contested, open process? Journalists can easily understand Twitter as a fast approach for the dissemination of information, but understanding how Twitter users can be utilised as early sensors for developing events is much harder. This is highlighted especially in the context of breaking news events, where Twitter information is now regularly brought into the mix. This also intersects with the ‘tyranny of real time’, which has existed at least since the emergence of 24-hour news channels, of course.

The real-time nature of social networks certainly adds to these tensions, but it also becomes possible to tap into the affordances of these distributed networks. Some news organisations are almost organically tapping into the new modes of storytelling which are possible here, even in the absence of clearly developed strategies for doing so – much live-sourced material from social media which is presented in ‘live update’ pages on news Websites isn’t verified at first, for example. This leads to the emergence of a less author-centric environment where the journalist becomes facilitator rather than sole reporter, in fact.

Rather than producing a definitive rendition of events (the ‘truth’), live and networked reporting practices reflect the emerging ‘truth’ in all its guises (including possible misinformation); journalists and newsrooms don’t necessarily accept that this is a fluid, changeable truth, however, and also don’t always believe in the ability of their users to understand the nature of this new ‘truth’. When reporters arrive in the trouble zone, there is often a clear shift back to author-centric, journalist-centric modes of reporting, for example.

Verification is problematic in the first place, of course – it is messy, and journalism has always been the art of what’s possible. But, many journalists appear to think, at least it took place in the newsroom; now, this verification is a distributed, very obviously messy and unstructured effort involving a variety of sources and actors, which circulate in a highly compressed news cycle. Some journalists, at least, are now rethinking their claims to know what has happened, and are positioning themselves as news ‘curators’ – but perhaps ‘facilitator’ is the better term: they facilitate a flow of information, and become only one of the voices in public communication, only one type of journalist alongside others, including citizens.

Updates take place now on social awareness streams, and journalism becomes more tentative and iterative, more contested; it is turned inside out, and may in fact be turning more truthful in the process.