AWJ - Verifying info found via social media

When you're live blogging, you have to write quickly and publish as soon as you can. The aim is to work with the immediacy offered by the net, to give people a sense of an event unfolding in real time. So some mistakes are inevitable -typos etc. You can cover yourself with a disclaimer which you can post early, or paste into your updates as a matter of course...

But you should do everything you can to try to avoid errors of fact. Rumours spread very quickly via social media. You need to step back at times and think a bit before passing it on. There are some things you can do to try to verify tweets and updates. Paul Bradshaw has an excellent guide to verifying online information in general. Zombie Journalism has a more specific guide for journalists using social media.