Chapter 5: Verifying Video Malachy Browne is news editor with Storyful, the first news agency of the social media age. Headquartered in Dublin and with staff in Asia and the U.S., Storyful helps its news clients discover, verify and distribute the most valuable user-generated content on social media platforms. Prior to Storyful, Browne created and edited Politico.ie, an Irish political website and news archive. He worked for the Irish political magazine Village from 2006 to 2008 and was editor of the magazine’s website, Village.ie. Formerly a computer programmer, Browne strongly believes in newsroom innovation and in the capacity of technology to strengthen journalism. Browne is from Broadford, County Limerick, and lives in Dublin. He tweets @malachybrowne. The convergence of affordable smartphone and camera technology, ubiquitous Internet access and social media is largely responsible for the explosion in citizen-powered news coverage. One byproduct of this is an enormous amount of video being uploaded and shared every minute, every hour. The revolution in information technology is not over and the volume of newsworthy usergenerated content will only grow. Journalists have a new responsibility - to quickly gather, verify and ascertain the usage rights of UGC. Traditional values of investigation apply, but a new skillset is required for media such as video. Verifying video from an unknown source on social media may initially appear daunting. But it’s not rocket science. Here’s what you need to get the job done: A determination to investigate the backstory of the content, coupled with a healthy level of skepticism and a familiarity with the multitude of free tools that can help establish facts about a video. This chapter will help to equip you with all three. A first point to understand about verifying user-generated video is that it spreads across social media in a way that makes the version you first see unlikely to be the original. Videos may be spliced, diced and reposted with different context. Important traces from the original video may disappear. Your job is to root out the facts that support or deny what this video purports to show. As with any story, start with the basic questions: who, what, when, where and why. In this context, the metadata associated with a video can help answer some of these questions by providing you with details about the original source, date and location. 47