Whether catastrophe in Japan, the Arab Spring or Osama Bin Laden’s demise, recent events have shown even hard-nosed skeptics that there’s no way to escape social media as a news source for journalists. But undiluted tweets and wall posts on Facebook don’t necessarily carry news value in and of themselves. You need the right filters and a clear search strategy to extract the most relevant content from the excess of information. As Clay Shirky put it, "It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”                                      ^{Photo credit: g23armstrong / Flickr}

How to stay on top of the latest, breaking news? How to filter the non-stop flow of information? How to discern relevant, credible sources? How to verify the information you find? Here are some steps you can take to cope with international breaking news.

 

Breaking news happens without warning. So you should be prepared by setting up your own personal news circle. Twitter is an ideal medium for staying on top of the latest because it allows you to create your own customized news ticker. It’s a good idea to follow the breaking news accounts of major media outlets, such as CNN, Spiegel, BBC, Al Jazeera. Also a good choice is an account called Breaking News, which combines hundreds of news sources from around the world.

 

You can also follow individual journalists who are hot on the tail of current events, such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Robert Mackey, the main blogger of The New York Times’ The Lede blog and Andy Carvin, senior strategist for social media at U.S. public radio network NPR, who twittered up to 16 hours a day during the revolution in Egypt and linked to relevant sources as events were taking place.

 

Of course everyone’s taste is different so you should build up your social circle according to yours. If Twitter isn’t your cup of tea, you can also use Facebook. All the major media have pages there with feeds on breaking news.

 

If you want to see at a glance what’s being filed from several different news sources, I suggest creating a “news” folder in your RSS reader (personally I think Google Reader is still your best bet), and direct all your news stream subscriptions to that one place.

 

 

One advantage of live blogs is that they often spare you from having to laboriously look for relevant social media sources yourself. Although some of them can be heavy on the text side and somewhat overloaded, they’re a good initial filter. They include interesting YouTube videos, eyewitness tweets and photos from Flickr.

The New York Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera all have good live blogs.

 

What’s the fastest way to search Twitter? The classic tool, Twitter Search is a standard way to find your way through Twitter. You can search according to language and the places function in the advanced options allows you to localize your search.

Unfortunately this search engine has its downsides. It can become convoluted as you browse through page after page, and it doesn’t always work perfectly (at least in my experience).

 

Once again it’s data giant Google that holds the trump card for real-time searching tools. Its timeline is particularly useful. It displays the course of Twitter updates, shows peak times of increased activity and with a little effort you can even pinpoint the first tweet of a news event.

 

By using “Updates with images” you can easily filter out tweets that feature pictures.

Google’s rival, Microsoft, also has a web search engine called Bing. Under Bing Social there’s an option to search for real-time information from social networks.

 

Topsy The added value of this Twitter search engine is that the number of tweets and relevancy of Twitter profiles are displayed in the results. That’s particularly useful for breaking news events when you want to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant links.

 

Monitter.com Lets you follow several hashtags at once.

 

Backtweets Sometimes it’s helpful to know who tweeted which link. Find out with backtweets. Simply enter the link.

 

Twellow.com If you’re looking for users twittering about a certain topic, try the “Twitter Yellow Pages”. Search results are listed according to the number of followers.

 

There are countless Twitter apps for searching and retrieving information. Oneforty.com features an extensive directory of them.

 

Listorious.com allows you to search Twitter users and Twitter lists according to topics.

 

Many media organizations compile their own Twitter lists which include the accounts of their own reporters or interesting users. If you’re looking for a specific organization’s lists, Google’s the fastest way (e.g. simply search for “New York Times Twitter list”).

 

Global Voices is a network of bloggers that has good Twitter lists (especially by bloggers) when it comes to crises and catastrophes of a global nature, see for example the Morocco list.

 

Platforms like Youtube and Flickr are treasure troves of eyewitness accounts.

 

 

 

 In YouTube’s search options you can sort by “upload date” to see the most recent uploads. In Flickr you can select “recent” in the search results. YouTube even has a dedicated channel for user-generated content, Citizentube.

 

Can this material be used? Yes, if it it’s governed by a Creative Commons license. Otherwise normal copyright rules applies and you have to ask the owner directly.

Flickr’s advanced search lets you search specifically for content with a Creative Commons license.

Some media outlets, such as Al Jazeera, provide photos  and videos with Creative Commons attribution licenses.

 

Many eyewitness reports are distributed to Twitter through Twitter apps such as Twitpic and Yfrog. You can conduct a search by using either Google Realtime Search (status updates with images) mentioned earlier, or with special search engines for Twitter pics like twicsy, twipho and twitcaps.

 

You can use TinEye.com to find out which Web pages are using a particular photo. In this case keep in mind, however, that this search engine isn’t ideal as a real-time search because it needs a while to crawl for picture updates. Still, it’s interesting to see how many pages are using a particular photo.

 

To search for relevant blogs from areas struck by catastrophe or crisis, Global Voices is a network that filters the blogosphere according to relevant topics and credible content.

Google Blog Search and social media search engine samepoint.com  also deliver good results.

 

When there’s big breaking news Ustream is worth a look. Media organizations and individuals provide live-streamed content. It’s also an active forum for citizen journalists, who nowadays need nothing more than a smartphone to provide breaking coverage.

One interesting example of a Ustream channel is Yokosonews by Katsuyuki “Katz” Ueno. After the March 2011 earthquake in Japan he streamed practically around the clock, providing detailed information and updates in English from Japanese sources.

 

Google News has become a standard tool for searching news updates. Follow these tips to make the most of it.

 

To keep the flood of news in check, it’s a good idea of course to define the terms you want to search for. If you have a Google account, Google News lets you create a user-defined section that will automatically appear in the left-hand navigation menu of the Google News interface. A very practical aspect is that you can define the location of news sources you want to search.

 

When you conduct a search using Google News, it automatically creates an RSS feed for that search. This is very practical if you’re researching a specific topic and want to stay on top of the latest news being released about it. Simply conduct your search and then click on the RSS icon at the foot of the results page. You can then subscribe to the feed in your Google Reader.

 

The Ushahidi platform was developed in Kenya in 2008 to document unrest following elections. Since that time, practically every major catastrophe or crisis has been given its own Ushahidi platform. Anyone can submit up-to-the-minute, local information by text message or online. The information is visualized in an online map. Ushahidi has proven to be especially useful for aid organizations to coordinate rescue efforts. To see how Ushahidi has been put to use for Japan, click here.

A very quick way to use the Ushahidi platform that requires no server installation can be found at crowdmap.com.

Google Maps is often used to visualize crisis data, for example the information collected by a Twitter user who goes by the name of @Arasmus to map violence against pro-democracy protests in Libya.

 

Of course there’s the big issue of the reliability of information collected from social media sources. As with any source, the information must be verified. You can find some excellent tips in an article called How to verify a Tweet posted by Craig Kanally and in this post by Paul Bradshaw called Content, context and code: verifying information online.