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8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c

How to: verify content from social media Experts advise on the process of verification Posted: 3 April 2012 By: Rachel McAthy 0 Comments and 0 Reactions Facebook and Twitter for how to There are a wealth of questions, tools and techniques journalists can use to verify content from social media The mass of information now available and being shared online offers a fantastic arena for journalists to engage with online communities and pick up on breaking news at the same time. This means journalists are also having to sharpen their verification and fact-checking skills in a digital environment. This how-to features advice from a panel of experts on the key considerations, questions and tools journalists should have in mind when carrying out verification of content that surfaces via social media, be it a news tip, an image, a piece of audio or video. The process covers three main stages: monitoring of social networks and the online community before news breaks, checking the content when it comes into play and subsequently reporting that content once verified. The comprehensive advice outlined in this how-to guide offers practical steps, specific questions and cross-checks journalists can make at each stage, as well as online tools to support them.

Understanding how to clean data is an important skill every reporter needs. Demographic, financial and other data is available on a city, county, state and national level in the United States. But understanding how to take a large data file and distill it into a usable form can be daunting. In this tutorial, you'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. This is a general tutorial and it doesn't delve deeply into one program. We'll use Microsoft Excel but most of the same techniques work in Google Spreadsheets and other programs.