Tip Sheet: Ryan Thornburg

Assistant Professor
Citizen Media, University of North Carolina
ryan.thornburg@unc.edu
Social Networks
For Reporting
“Now we know that reaching people on the Internet is like knocking on doors.” — Leonard Downie
Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/
1329/horn-of-plenty

Find a Person Who Might Know Something

1. Go to Twitter and look who is using hashtags related to your story.
2. Search Yahoo and Google groups.
3. Search Wordpress blogs and comments at http://en.search.wordpress.com
4. Find blogs with “tags” related to your story: http://en.wordpress.com/tags/
5. Find blogs on Blogger that are written by people in your city. For example,
bloggers in Chattanooga, Tenn., can be found by using these variables in the URL.
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?
t=l&loc0=US&loc1=tn&loc2=Chattanooga. (You can use similar techniques to
browse the interests, occupations, and industries of bloggers.)
6. Search “tags” or captions on Flickr.com for photos related to your story.
7. Search other photo-sharing sites:
a. Shutterfly: http://community.shutterfly.com/gallery/search/start.sfly
b. Slide: http://www.slide.com/search
c. Photobucket: http://photobucket.com/findstuff/
d. Search for videos on Google Video, YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace

Find Something About a Person You Know

1. Search for the e-mail address of your subject, rather than his or her name.
2. If you find your subject using a pseudonym on one social network, look for that
same pseudonym on other social networks.
3. Look for Web pages your subject bookmarks: http://delicious.com/[UserName]
4. Look for Amazon profiles: Google search “amazon profile [first name] [last
name]”
5. Use UIDs:
a. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=692928528
b. http://www.linkedin.com/ppl/webprofile?vmi=&id=6388496
c. http://www.myspace.com/254959367.
Tip Sheet: Citizen Media, Social Networks For Reporting, Page 2 — Ryan Thornburg

How to Begin an Interview on Social Media

1. Identify yourself as a reporter.
2. Consider anything you find on social media to be “on the record,” but make every
effort to verify the context and legitimacy of the information.
3. Be formal and polite when contacting sources for the first time.
4. Give your potential source all your contact information, along with best times to
reach you.
5. Demonstrate the research you’ve already done. Ask one very specific question
that shows you won’t be wasting the source’s time.
6. Provide first-time sources links to your profiles and previous work.
7. Triple check everything with a human source!

How Can You Trust Online Content?

1. You can’t. No more or less than you trust other sources you’ve never met.
2. Who created the page? (Search the WhoIs directory for hints.)
3. Why did they create it? (Rational people usually act in their own self-interest.)
4. When was it created? (Are the facts still accurate?)
5. What other sites link to the site, and what do they say about it? (On Google, use
“link:[URL of target page]”)
6. Is the site a primary source or a secondary source? (Wikipedia is a very good
secondary source, but it is not a primary source.)
7. On Wikipedia, learn how to use and read each article’s “History” page.

This tip sheet comes from Chapter 6 of Ryan Thornburg’s book Producing Online News, published by
CQPress. For more examples, exercises, ideas and case studies buy the book and subscribe to the related
online module at http://www.cqpress.com.