Chapter 3: Verifying User-Generated Content Claire Wardle is a research fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, working on a major research project on user-generated content and television news. She designed the social media training program for the BBC in 2009 and went on to train journalists around the world on social newsgathering and verification. For the past two years Claire has been working with Storyful1. Claire has a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is @cward1e2 on Twitter and blogs at clairewardle.com3. In less than a decade, newsgathering has been transformed by two significant developments. The first is mobile technology. In the summer of 2013 an important tipping point was reached. For the first time, more than half (55 percent) of all new mobile phone handsets sold were smartphones4. By definition a smartphone has a high-quality camera with video capability, and it allows the user to easily connect to the Web to disseminate the pictures. As a result, more and more people have the technology in their pockets to very quickly film events they see around them, and share them directly with people who might be interested, as well as more widely via social networks. The second, connected development is the social Web. When the BBC’s User Generated Content Hub started its work in early 2005, they were reliant on people sending content to one central email address. At that point Facebook had just over 5 million users, rather than the more than one billion today. YouTube and Twitter hadn’t launched. Now, every minute of the day, 100 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube5, 250,000 tweets are sent and 2.4 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook.a Audience behavior has shifted substantially. Rather than film something and, when prompted, send it to a news organization, people shoot what they see and upload it to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Research has shown very few audience members have enough understanding of the news process to think of their footage as valuable enough to send it, unprompted, to a news organization or other entity.b Essentially, they’re uploading the content to share the experience with their friends a These stats change all of the time, but this is the most recent attempt at measuring activity on the most popular social networks http://blog.qmee.com/qmee-online-in-60-seconds/ « b http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange/cardiffone.pdf « 25