This is a three-week training workshop conducted by journalist from Storyful, a social media information gathering/ content producing platform used by many journalists and marketers. The training time is April 11/ 18/ 25 afternoon at CVA703. Digital forensics and verification is also related with data journalist’s day-to-day job, especially many data/ information nowadays come from social media. We will have the second class of the workshop tomorrow, Wednesday April 18, at 4:30pm in the CVA 703 lab. Please find the following announcement edited from Robin Ewing’s message.

The trainers this week are Storyful journalists Rachel Blundy and Layla Mashkoor.

  • Rachel was a journalist with the SCMP before coming to Storyful
  • Layla worked in communications and marketing.

They will focus on using forensic verification tools to investigative and verify social photos and video and how you can debunk fake or misleading content. This will be a hands-on workshop and great training for those of you who want to work in media or communication.

Prerequisite: The trainers have asked that everyone have a Twitter account and a TweetDeck account. Please open free accounts before class if you don’t already have them.

Recap of April 11 workshop

For those of you who missed last week’s class, we learned how newsrooms follow news on social media to stay ahead of the news cycle and find story ideas and how you can use the same tools to keep track of the news. We also learned how to spot fake social media profiles!

Here are some resources from last week’s class:

  • Iain Martin’s Keynote presentation with links is attached.
  • Create some Twitter lists! Don’t know where to start? Here are some ideas:
    •  A Hong Kong list: Hong Kong politicians, activists, media, professors
    •  A China list: Look for organizations that cover china specifically like SupChina (@supchinanews) and journalists like Chris Buckley (@ChuBailiang)
    • A breaking news list: create a list of media organziations you like. Try to get a variety so that you learn about things outside your normal life
    • A journalist/media list: Follow people you like. For example, I like to hear what Jay Rosen has to say. He’s a journalism professor in New York and a media critic (@jayrosen_nyu). Look at who people you like follow and discover new accounts.
    •   Your workshop trainers! Storyful (@Storyful), Iain Martin (@_IainMartin),  Rachel Blundy (@rachelblundy ‏), Layla Mashkoor (@layla_maria) and Jeremy Blum (@blummer102)
  • A good tutorial on how to use TweetDeck to monitor Twitter accounts and lists
  • An explainer on social media monitoring platform CrowdTangle and how to use it to gain insights on your social media posts and others. This is good for social media managers who need to learn how best to leverage online publishing.
  • A tutorial on how to use Feedly, a web tool that helps you aggregate, follow and monitor news.
  •  Here’s a good New York Times article on fake social media accounts: The Follower Factory