It took just a day for the Ukrainian site stopfake.org to published details of the real origin of the photo – one of hundreds of fake reports that the website has debunked since it started in March 2014.

The StopFake site is run by a small group of current and former students from the Mohyla School of Journalism in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. When pro-Russian forces started to invade Crimea back in February, the school’s director, Yevhen Fedchenko, called students and alumni together for a brainstorming session.

“There was a lot of Russian propaganda and very little hard news,” Fedchenko said to onMedia via Skype from Kiev. “One of our students suggested starting a website debunking propaganda, and so we immediately decided to set up StopFake on WordPress.”

The amount of disinformation about Ukraine is staggering. Russian media, much of which is state-controlled, has been broadcasting for months what the New York Times has called “bluster and hyperbole, … misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine.” Other media organizations, from the BBC to the Guardian and Germany’s Spiegel magazine have written recently about Russia’s “relentless propaganda war”.

Because of the sheer flood of Russian-language misinformation, StopFake curates and refutes false claims spread only by Russian media and doesn’t examine false claims potentially made by the Ukrainian media or government.

The fake-busting site has proved hugely popular. In its first few weeks of operation, it had 1.5 million visitors and some of the weekly video round-ups detailing the fakes have more than 100,000 views on YouTube.

Verifying images

Photos and videos aren’t that difficult to check, says Fedchenko. The journalists working for the site do this by looking at metadata which can reveal the date and location the footage was shot, in combination with search tools like Google or the Firefox add-on, Who stole my pictures?.

This AP Photo by Guillermo Arias shot is Mexico was published on Politikus.ru as showing dead Ukrainian militants in Sloviansk

“There are pictures or footage supposedly shot in Ukraine which actually come from Iraq, Syria, Mexico and even from Tiananmen Square in China and they were quite easy to debunk,” says Fedchenko.

Stopfake.org have even prepared a page with information on how readers can identify a fake for themselves in the hope that people will become more critical about the information they find on the Internet.

For other stories, the journalists rely heavily on that basic journalism skill – fact checking. For example, the Russian President Vladimir Putin recently claimed one in three Ukrainians – or thirty percent of the population – was working in Russia. A couple of clicks through official statistics and Stopfake.org proved – with screenshots – that only seven percent work in Russia. That’s a massive difference.

But other rumours are more difficult to verify, says Fedchenko, especially when false information is mixed together with real facts. Earlier in June, a bomb was dropped on story the city of Luhansk. One theory was that it was the Ukrainian airforce, the other was it was terrorists who stole the plane.

“We took all the hypotheses and collected all the videos and analysed them from different angles and tried to give explore the different theories,” he explained. “It was very popular.”

Getting people involved

Another success is the bright red “Report a Fake” button on the site’s homepage. By clicking on the button, visitors can give details of potential fakes. When they first added the button, the group were worried that it would be misused by so-called trolls – people who are paid to leave comments on the Internet. But, says Fedchenko, they have received “tons of feedback” via the button and it has the added advantage of giving users a way of participating in the project.

The website was originally targeted at Russian speakers in the Crimea, where independent Russian language media was shut down at the beginning of the invasion. However, it seems Russians are also hungry for independent information, with one third of Stopfake.org’s visitors coming from Russia. They are also very active in reporting fakes, Fedchenko says.

The site has an English version too – it was important for the team to give Ukraine a voice outside of their country. After several journalists were detained in Eastern Ukraine, many Western media organizations, including Germany’s public ARD and ZDF broadcasters, have recalled their correspondents.

Despite StopFake’s popularity, most of the team work as journalists for other media organizations and can only work on the site in their spare time. They have received some 8,000 euro in donations, but are otherwise paying expenses out of their own pockets. The hope is that in the future, crowdfunding will enable them to payroll full-time staff.

Template for others

Financial issues aside, Fedchenko says the project is easily replicable in other countries with similar problems. The team have the skills expected of any online journalists – writing, editing, photo-cropping and resizing, video editing and creating infographics for the weekly video wrap-up.

“We do the same things as anyone else would do – find the truth, check the facts, talk to people, and these are universal ways to improve journalism in any country.”

StopFake won the People’s Choice for Russian section of Deutsche Welle’s Best of the Blogs Awards – better known as the BOBS.

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Written by Kate Hairsine

Klout If you’re interested in your overall social media performance, Klout is probably your best choice. It basically ranks your online influence by analyzing the size of your social media network, how often you post and the number of links, retweets and shares your content gets. This so-called “Klout Score” includes data from several social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Instagram. Klout scores range from 1 to 100 – the higher your number, the higher your social influence. How much a Klout Score means, however, is up for debate.

Topsy Simply paste in the URL of your article, video, photo or whatever and you immediately see a complete list of who has shared it and how often it’s been shared. You can also see what languages it’s being shared in. Topsy can do several other neat things – here’s a detailed explanation.

HootSuite is a social media management system where you can organize and monitor different social media accounts through the one interface. Many big companies and brands like Facebook and the Obama administration use the tool but there is also a scaled-down free version available.  A great features for journalists being able to schedule your feeds ahead of time for different social media accounts. You can also get statistics on your followers.

SproutSocial $ Use this social media management platform to monitor incoming messages and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. SproutSocial also delivers Twitter and Facebook statistics and lets you compare the performance of various Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, it’s not free, but it is popular because of its clean interface and ease-of-use.

SocialBro $ focuses on Twitter only. Which of my users don’t follow me any more? Who are my most influential followers? When is the best time for me to set up a tweet to reach as many people as possible? If you need answers to these questions, try using SocialBro. It offers a detailed analysis of your followers. It also allows you to manage several Twitter accounts at the same time. There isn’t a free version available.

Tweriod Great if you are just interested in the feature of publishing your tweet at the perfect time specifically. It analysis both your own and your follower’ tweets and calculates best time frames for your highest tweet exposure. It’s free.

Followerwonk $ Another tool specializing in analyzing Twitter. There are more than 18 statistics to discover about your own follower such as gender, age or size of accounts. An interesting feature is a map that shows the origin of your followers. If you’re looking to build stronger online relationships with influential followers (or accounts you follow), Followerwonk easily identifies influencers for you. You can access parts of Followerwonk for free but some of the most useful information, such as the mapping, you to buy a subscription.

Tweetreach The free version of Tweetreach analyzes Tweets including a certain hashtag or URL to help you find out the reach of your Tweets.

Twitter Analytics Relatively basic. Shows the number of followers you have, the origin of your followers, an overview of who your follower also follow and, of course, your tweet activity.

FanpageKarma  This lets you analyze your, or someone else’s, fan pages on Facebook and other social media channels. The free version includes the following functions: Analysis of which post types are most popular, top fans and posting frequency.

More resources

If you would like to know more about social media analyzing tools or websites, you should check out the post, 50 top tools social media monitoring analytics and management on Socialmediatoday.com. And here’s a neat overview of free twitter analytics.

Another quite good resource is 11 Free Tools for Measuring Social Media Success.

More social media tips from onMedia

Quick tips on searching for Twitter lists

Making broadcasting more social

A guide for journalists to get the most out of Twitter

Written by Daniela Späth, edited by Kate Hairsine

But how do you go about searching for good Twitter lists or refining your search for specific information within a Twitter list?

Here are a few quick search tips to try. (If you’re new to Twitter and want to find out how to create or subscribe to a list check out this guide.)

Look at who is following who

I find it’s always an interesting exercise to check out the public lists of people I follow on Twitter.

For example, I had been looking to make a list of people tweeting about Berlin. But first, I checked the lists curated by journalists in Berlin who I follow and found a quite good public list about Berlin. It was much easier to subscribe to this list than create a new one. This list is a quick way for me to find out about events happening in my home city, and for potential story ideas.

When you’re logged into Twitter, all you have to do is go to someone’s profile page and click on Lists to see the public lists they have subscribed to, or are a member of.

Using Google search

Public Twitter lists are also searchable through Google.

The shortcut search method is to do a single website search by typing site:website.com “keywords” into Google.

In other words, you’re asking Google to only search the website twitter.com plus specific “keywords” in quotation marks.

In the example below, I’m trying to search for public lists on twitter.com about “media development”.

This method produces some good results. You can of course use Google’s Advanced Search tool to do exactly the same and more such as search for results in a particular language.

Find specific information within a Twitter list

Creating or subscribing to public lists can help you start cutting through the “noise” of Twitter and find useful information. But lets face it, even with a good Twitter list that is regularly updated and maintained, you might need to occasionally refine your search even further. This is where a tool like Tweetdeck can help.

Tweetdeck is a free application that lets you manage your Twitter timelines and organize them into columns. So, if you’re subscribing to a list, all of the tweets from that list can be viewed in separate column.

When you click on the slider icon at the top right hand side of a column in Tweetdeck, a drop down menu appears. The default setting for Content (information in tweets) is Any.

If you wish to look for specific keywords, or exclude keywords, within tweets from this list, select Any. Another drop down menu will appear and gives you the options of matching and excluding keywords. Enter your keywords and the list will automatically adjust to only display tweets with what you’re looking for.

In the example above, I have a public list of bloggers I follow who tweet about photography and videography. They usually tweet about the latest camera and filming equipment. But if I want to only see tweets about say the new Panasonic GH4 camera, then entering “GH4” in the matching field helps me to refine my search. I have also selected to exclude any retweets, again a simple way of filtering unwanted noise.

In an upcoming blog post we’ll take closer a look at List.ly – a tool not only for creating and searching Twitter lists, but also helpful for making them more social.

Author: Guy Degen

Instagram was launched in 2010 as an iPhone application to produce and share square shaped photographs with a range of filters – a very smartphone nod to the classic Polaroid instamatic photograph.

The rest you might say is history.

In 2012 Instagram was bought by Facebook for $US 1 billion. The 15 second video feature was added in 2013. The Instagram application is also available for Android and Windows smartphones.

Instagram says it has more than 150 million active monthly users. And that’s what makes the platform interesting for media organizations – it’s a way of reaching new audiences who consume media on mobile devices and tapping into the conversations on a social media network devoted to images.

Here’s onMedia’s quick round up of some of the media organizations using Instagram which might make you look at this popular app in a different light. Plus, there’re some tips on creating Instagram video news for yourself. 

NowThis News

NowThis News specializes in providing short form video content and video news for social media networks. It’s worthwhile checking out their feed @nowthisnews for ideas on producing and editing Instagram video. Many of their videos use voice narration, prominent text overlays and music.

BBC Instafax

In January the BBC rolled out its #Instafax video news experiment on the @bbcnews Instagram feed. Instafax news videos use a blend of video, photos and text overlays accompanied by music and a punchy BBC ident.

The Comment function serves as the space to include a story introduction or to give more context to a video. And as with Twitter, using relevant #hashtags shows how news organizations are adapting their online writing to different platforms. The BBC includes a dedicated URL (BBC.in/topic) to “READ MORE” about a topic on the BBC News website. Though at the moment hyperlinks are not active on Instagram – only #hashtags and @usernames.

It’ll be interesting to see how BBC’s #Instafax format evolves. The videos so far cover hard news items as well as quirky stories that have good video and images. Overall #Instafax demonstrates that you can deliver news and information by short video in a clever way.

Al Jazeera
The @aljazeera Instagram feed has started to move on from mainly showing behind the scenes production photos to previewing its In Pictures photo features and its new digital Al Jazeera Magazine publication.

Al Jazeera has used Instagram to crowd source contributions from users during demonstrations in Egypt. And it’s also using Instagram in the #FreeAJStaff campaign to call for the release of the AJ journalists currently imprisoned in Cairo.

Wall Street Journal

In recent weeks, the @wsj Instagram feed has featured calls for users to submit their images on themes such as Movember #WSJMustache and Chinese New Year #WSJCNY; and to preview in-depth multimedia specials.

The animated infographic below is something different and is a clip from the WSJ video series #TheShortAnswer.

The Guardian

The Guardian says it’s letting their journalists take over the @guardiannews Instagram feed while they’re on assignment – even producing “selfies” in the name of journalism.

Interestingly, the @guardiancities feed is a separate account for curating urban photography via the hashtag #guardiancities. Using a separate account for gathering the best photos on a specific theme looks like a good idea as Instagram hashtags can often be bombarded by irrelevant images or streams of selfies.

Who else to follow on Instagram?

Photo agencies Panos Pictures and Magnum are now featuring their photographers on Instagram, making it interesting to see how professional photographers are adapting to the application.

The @npr stream of National Public Radio takes you behind the scenes in studios plus offers fun Instagram videos on how to make dumplings.

Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC News, publishes photos from their reporters and audience on Instagram. A recent video showing the demolition of a copper stack is a classic “the moment when…” web video clip.

How to produce Instagram video news

Trying to tell a story within 15 seconds requires not only strong photos and video but also some tight editing. Don’t forget if you film your video in HD or in a standard 16:9 rectangle, you have to consider the effect of scaling and adjusting the position of the image to fit Instagram’s square frame size.

Creating a timeline with a 640×640 size frame in your video editing software is going to be a good starting point. This tutorial from WhoIsMatt for editing and exporting video for Instagram in Adobe Premiere Pro CC is a useful guide for settings.

And if you’re looking for a web-based method, check out Andy Dickinson’s clever No-Budget Way to Make BBC Instafax Style Video for Instagram guide.

Is it hip to be square?

Cropping, scaling and adjusting the position of your photo and video to fit Instagram’s 1:1 square frame has always been part of the process of uploading photos from your mobile phone to the service.

The latest iOS for iPhones now includes a square frame option in the native camera app for photos.

A photographer might well decide to frame and compose photographs that are intended for the Instagram platform.

But do you always have to be square and lose part of your frame? After all most photographers would shoot in a standard 3:2 aspect ratio and videographers shooting in HD would capture footage in a 16:9 frame.

There are several apps that let you upload your photos to Instagram in their original aspect ratio – usually by placing the image over a neutral background, or by creating a collage.

This could also be something to consider for crafting video news for distribution via Instagram.

NowThis News and BBC Instafax videos for example overlay text on the image – the key facts of the story. But the video could also be a smaller rectangle size occupying the top or bottom of the frame and leaving the remainder space for text or something else. Perhaps a question of storytelling geometry?

No matter what format you use, it all comes down to telling a short story for a small screen.

Author: Guy Degen

Social media networks are valuable sources of information but not everything that is posted, tweeted and uploaded is true. And under the pressure of breaking news, many journalists struggle to find ways of verifying the authenticity of pictures and videos on the Internet or establishing the credibility of those posting information. Luckily, help is at hand with the excellent (and free) Verification Handbook, published by the European Journalism Centre and available online.

Written by reporters and human rights researchers from leading organizations such as BBC, Storyful and Amnesty International, the Verification Handbook is jam-packed with practical information, tools and case studies. The handbook drives home why journalists need to be diligent about verifying user-generated content and also provides plenty of pointers on how news reporters can do this for themselves.

The Verification Handbook is targeted primarily at news journalists and others who cover emergencies or disasters (because humanitarian or emergency workers also need to carefully check information). After all, putting out accurate information or debunking rumors can mean life or death in emergency situations.

But many sections of the handbook are a ‘must read’ for any journalist using social media to source information – and really, that’s most of us.

“There was so much false information and rumors circulating on social media during the earthquake in Japan or during Hurricane Sandy, like the photo lifted from the movie The Day After Tomorrow,” said project manager Rina Tsubaki from the European Journalism Centre.

“We thought there was a real need for something like this.”

The handbook, which is split into ten short chapters, is particularly easy-to-read with abundant pictures and images illustrating the points in question.

Several of the chapters discuss aspects of digital verification such as “Verifying User-Generated Content”, “Verifying Images” and “Verifying Video”. There are also chapters on how to use the crowd to help finding out information and how to prepare for the coverage of disasters.

Something I found particularly useful were the case studies accompanying each section. Malachy Browne from the social media news agency Storyful, for example, gives a blow by blow description of how they verified the authenticity a video of the Boston marathon bombing (it turned out the video was shot by an athlete approaching the finishing line as the bomb went off).

The case study also shows the necessity of being absolutely confident in using the verification tools before news actually starts breaking – Storyful confirmed the video was authentic in 10 minutes flat.

This photo proved to be a photoshop fake

In another case study, Tom Phillips from BuzzFeed UK writes about what tools he used to debunk the authenticity of photos of sharks allegedly swimming up a New Jersey street during Hurricane Sandy.

“We wanted to showcase the real life examples of how people are dealing with these kinds of situations,” Tsubaki said about the case studies.

Because video is particularly difficult to verify, the handbook includes three case studies in this section – two from Storyful and one from Amnesty.

The final chapter has a great list of tools for verifying places, verifying identity and verifying images.

What really comes through over and over again in the handbook, though, is the need for journalists continue to think like – well, journalists. Even though the content is being created by someone else, you still have to establish who the person is, where they are, why they are there, and what their motives were for posting something.

The Verification Handbook is available online as well as downloadable as a pdf, ePub or Kindle version.

It is currently available in English. According to Tsubaki, Arabic and Ukrainian versions will be published within the next few months and Portuguese and Japanese versions are also to follow.