Josh Stearns describes how he has tracked and, equally important, verified reports of journalists being arrested at Occupy protests around the country. “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to quibble about who is a journalist, and who isn’t. My goal was to account for anyone who was clearly committing acts of journalism when they were arrested. However, I also recognize that to hold police and city officials accountable for these arrests, those being arrested had to identify as journalists publicly – either with some form of credentials or verbally,” Stearns writes. In one case, he removed a journalist from his list after learning that the person was participating in the protests, not covering them.
He tells me by email that he’s been criticized for including student journalists on his list, “but I reject the notion that student journalists are not full journalists, or somehow doesn’t deserve First Amendment protections.” He also hasn’t heard from any individual bloggers (people unaffiliated with an organization’s site) to tell him about being arrested or mistreated.
Stearns says in his post that verification was an important part of this process, elaborating in an email that his decision on when to publish each name depended on how he got his information. “In general, I wanted to get the information up and available, but was willing to wait to get it right. After tracking this for a number of weeks I knew this was an ongoing process, not an effort to capture breaking news and be first.”
So that meant:
If I heard about an arrest via email or twitter from a “random” or unknown source, I wouldn’t add the name to the list until I could verify that the person was indeed arrested, was indeed a journalist working for a news org. In most cases I waited for two independent confirmations from other people on Twitter, from my own Web research or from the journalist’s outlet.
If I saw a journalist tweeting their own arrest, I tried to confirm via Twitter with other people in that area on the ground, and with the person’s outlet.
If I found out about the arrest from a news article I added it immediately and then tried to find as much additional context as possible (video, tweets, etc.).
In his post he links to resources on how to verify information obtained via social media. || Related: When covering Occupy Wall Street, “most city reporters will tell you that the press pass actually confers less access than that of a regular person.” (The Village Voice) | Social media editor role expands to include fighting misinformation during breaking news (Poynter.org) | News outlets outsource social media confirmation to Storyful (CJR) | Site counts Occupy arrests nationwide, as reported by media outlets (OccupyArrests.com)
