How the media cope with the flow of real-time information (Materials @ 140Conf)

Twitter is not the only social media or a means of “democratizing” the flow of information, but it did increase the speed at which news, rumors, deceptions, and other potentially defamatory information spread. At 140Conf, Arianna Huffington, Peter Hirshberg, Al Seckel, Caprice Young from KCDL and John Kline (Jon Kline) from CNN discussed the challenges faced by the media and educational organizations in an ever-increasing volume of information coming in without verification or context. In addition, they argued how companies can benefit from this.

• Use the flow wisely. “Every company finds ways to deal with this stream. The Hourly Press website allows editors to take lists and links to news that resonate in different areas, and reports every hour how these topics develop on the Internet, ”said Hörschberg. “There is such a company Social Compact , which monitors 30 data sources that come in real time to attract investment in troubled urban areas. And the AMA company uses Twitter during live broadcasts to check whether the broadcast topics are relevant to viewers. ”
• Ask the people for the best news. “The best way to tell the world something valuable is to rely on as many sources of information as possible,” says Klein. - “It takes more time, because we have to check more information, sometimes makes more confusion, but with the participation of several journalists and observers (we ourselves can’t be everywhere at once, but our observers can) we can create not two, but three picture. "
• An endless stream of information requires human moderation. “It’s impossible to work with a traditional test of every fact by a person, but at the same time it’s impossible to work with a manual check of all comments,” says Huffington. - “We have 30 moderators on the forum, working around the clock. I insisted on it from the very beginning, because if you want to organize civil discussion and criticism, so that people write to you for free, then you have to fight with trolls and anonymous aggression. ”
• Cultivate a new generation of consumers and news creators. “Children today are very advanced in terms of technology, but weak in terms of information.” Said Young, director of KC Distance Learning. “They don’t have the opportunity to determine the authenticity of the content on the web, but they are extremely quick to distribute it. They are one of the fastest producers of real-time information. Therefore, we need to teach them to check this information first. ”

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From the translator. See also: How can the media use Twitter? (Review of Western media practices.)