staged or not.” This realization that there is no silver bullet, no perfect test, is the starting point for any examination of verification, and for the work of providing reliable information in a disaster. This requires journalists and others to first look to the fundamentals of verification that have existed for decades and that won’t become obsolete. Steve Buttry focuses on a core question at the heart of verification in his chapter. Joining that is this list of fundamentals: • Put a plan and procedures in place before disasters and breaking news occurs. • Develop human sources. • Contact people, talk to them. • Be skeptical when something looks, sounds or seems too good to be true. • Consult credible sources. • Familiarize yourself with search and research methods, and new tools. • Communicate and work together with other professionals - verification is a team sport. One other maxim that has been added to the above list in recent years is that when trying to evaluate information - be it an image, tweet, video or other type of content - you must verify the source and the content. When The Associated Press promoted Fergus Bell to take the lead in creating and practicing its process for confirming user-generated video, he first looked to the organization’s longstanding guidance on verification, rather than to new tools and technology. “AP has always had its standards and those really haven’t changed, and it was working with those standards that we were able to specifically set up workflows and best practices for dealing with social media,” Bell said. “So AP has always strived to find the original source so that we can do the reporting around it. And that’s always the way that we go about verifying UGC. We can’t verify something unless we speak to the person that created it, in most cases.” By starting with these fundamentals, organizations can begin to build a reliable, repeatable process for verifying information during emergency situations. Verifying information on social networks, be it claims of fact, photos or video, becomes easier once you know your standards, and know how to apply them. That’s when it’s possible to make the best use of tools such as EXIF readers, photo analysis plug-ins, advanced Twitter search, whois domain lookups and the other tools outlined in this book. Along with that toolkit, and the standards and processes that inform how we use the tools, there is also the critical element of crowdsourcing: bringing the public into the process and 11