Twitter is the world news wire of the twenty-first century;
immediate, instantaneous information from across the globe, at
your finger tips at any time. Everyone knows exactly how useful
microblogging can be when reporting on everything from major
world events, such as natural disasters and social upheaval, to
local happenings - but the challenge of real-time reporting is
not gaining access to information, but rather verifying it. This
prompts the question: how best to verify news gathered from
social media, particularly if official sources contradict what
the twittersphere portrays as truth? As Daniel Victor reports,
this was the challenge faced by reporters from the Philadelphia
Daily News, when on July 4th Twitter presented journalists with
news about a shooting in the city, a shooting of which the
police had no knowledge. So, how do large new organisations go
about tackling situations like this and what is the best model
to imitate? In his Reuters' Institute, University of Oxford,
Fellowship Paper, entitl