Category: Journalism

  • Finding Ken Brown & his photos of Virgin Galactic test flight crash

    These images tell the story of how the Virgin Galactic test flight crash was seen by an eyewitness, Ken Brown. This is an account of how I found him and got him on to BBC News Channel by 21:15 GMT, then BBC Radio 5 live and BBC World TV. Virgin Galactic tourism rocket suffers "in-flight…

  • The hazards of war reporting from the other side of the world

    Inspired by Alastair Leithead’s very insightful piece on The hazards of war reporting from the Libyan frontline, I’ve been meaning to write about my own experience of the Libyan revolutionary war as a journalist. Now that the world has witnessed the end of Muammar Qadhafi in all its grimness, I can’t put this off any…

  • Making video material verifiable – identifiable features

    Reading Journalism and a world in transition: Wadah Khanfar’s James Cameron memorial lecture I thought I’d pick out this passage which relates to how Syrian activists have helped make material easier to verify: The repetitive doubting, for instance by the Syrian authorities, of what al-Jazeera transmits of news and pictures received via Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and…

  • #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social media content

    Below is the text of an article I wrote for the BBC College of Journalism website on verification processes for social media in BBC News, published 11 May 2011: From Tunisia, via Egypt, to Libya and Syria, verifying and acquiring eyewitness/citizen journalist/user-generated content has become increasingly complicated as the material has become more sophisticated. At…

  • Newsgathering in the open

    My tweets from a discussion with Andy Carvin and Jay Rosen on the nature of Andy’s twitter work: is it newsgathering or news reporting?