On Tuesday night, at the Associated Press headquarters on far West 33rd Street, Muck Rack and the AP hosted a panel discussion on digital newsgathering standards as part of New York’s Social Media Week. (CJR also wrote about Muck Rack earlier this week after the company debuted its “Who Shared My Link” tool.)
The talk featured Eric Carvin and Sara Gillesby from the AP, Poynter’s Craig Silverman, and Steve Rubel, Edelman’s executive vice president for global strategy and insights. Muck Rack founder Greg Galant moderated, asking about how the AP uses social media in its reporting. The tl;dr version is that the AP has a large enough cadre of journalists to source and verify any social media-based tidbit a reporter considers using. They do this via means like contacting a post’s creator for verification (and permission) and using in-house experts on photography or video to check whether something has been fabricated.
To read more about how the evening unfolded, here’s a Storify of the event, including some of my tweets:
Kira Goldenberg was an associate editor at CJR from 2012-2015. Follow her on Twitter at @kiragoldenberg.