Sept. 2018 - How to use social media to build a beat and break news

Social media is a tremendous resource for journalists looking to build a beat, break news, or track down elusive man on the street sources on deadline. The real challenge is sifting through all the chatter and harnessing the full potential of social platforms. SABEW’s next teletraining session — featuring some of the best in the business when it comes to social media reporting — will help you do just that. Our panel of experts will share tips, best practices and strategies for using social media to build your beat, enhance your reporting and uncover scoops. Additionally, this intermediate/advanced-level session will dig into crowdsourcing, giving you guidance on how to verify content collected socially. We’ll also review some of the tools that are available to enhance your social media reporting.

Listen to the recording.

Moderator
Eric Carvin who directs social strategy at AP and serves on the board of the Online News Association, is recognized as a leading industry thinker on social journalism and on ethical and strategic issues related to digital news. Carvin oversees AP’s use of social media to uncover breaking news, gather user-generated content, connect with readers and share powerful content. He also guides AP’s journalists as they use social platforms in the pursuit of news. An 18-year AP veteran, he has extensive experience with innovative and interactive storytelling. He ran Ask AP, a column in which AP journalists answered readers’ questions about the news, and he edited “Far and Wide,” AP’s first news blog. He has played a number of other roles at AP, at times coordinating the global news report, at others editing national news copy or analyzing exit poll results. At ONA, Eric founded the News Ethics Committee, and co-founded an ONA working group that examines standards and ethics issues related to social newsgathering and that reshaped the industry’s conversation around this critical topic. Away from work, Eric spends his free time chasing a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old around the living room and, weather-permitting, the playground.
Twitter: @EricCarvin

Panelists
Nellie Bowles is a San Francisco-based reporter for the New York Times covering tech and culture. Prior to joining the Times, she was a correspondent for VICE News Tonight on HBO and a writer for the Guardian, Recode, and California Sunday. Before becoming a reporter, Nellie worked on epigenetics research at the University of California, San Francisco, and as a fellow with a neuroscience laboratory at McGill studying hypnosis. She was the 2011-2012 Fulbright Fellow to Swaziland.
Twitter: @NellieBowles

Sara O’Brien is a writer covering tech culture and startups for CNN Business. She frequently writes about topics including online harassment, H-1B visas, and technology’s role in alleviating or exacerbating social issues. Prior to joining CNN, Sara’s work was published by outlets including the New York Post, The Atlantic, the Date Report, and the New York Times. She is a 2014 graduate of Columbia Journalism School.
Twitter: @saraashleyo

Dennis Powell is an ABC News Sr. Producer based in Washington, D.C. He is part of the leadership team that oversees ABC’s social media accounts with a primary focus on how the news division sources and authenticates material and information from social platforms as news is breaking. Dennis has been with ABC News for over 35 years covering politics and elections, regulatory agencies, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Persian Gulf War and Guantanamo.
Twitter: @powelldennis

Aimee Rinehart manages training and international projects at the Information Disorder Project at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The ID Project fights misinformation by creating experimental journalism projects, undertaking research on those projects, and using research results to build resources and training for journalists and the wider public. She has worked online since 1996 for newspapers, magazines and nonprofits and was a digital founder at nytimes.com.
Twitter: @aimeetwoee