Around 2:50pm EST, as runners were crossing the finish line at the end of the Boston Marathon, a bomb apparently placed in a garbage can exploded. Roughly ten seconds later, a separate bomb hundreds of feet away also went off — both amid spectators. After that moment though, things begin to get hazy.

As Boston Police and media outlets work to piece together the tragic events that happened yesterday, a look back at Twitter uncovers a massive amount of disinformation propagated by both verified and unverified accounts from all over the world.

12 people were killed. The Boston Police Department has a Saudi national as a suspect. Cellphone service had been cut off. There were seven undetonated bombs found in neighboring buildings.

All of these above reports, which occurred within hours of the explosion, have all been proved unverified at best and false at worst. Read more

Social media producers battle for eyeballs, retweets and clicks. They fight because tweets fly by fast, easily slipping by readers in a stream shared with cat gifs and @KimKierkegaard.

News tweeting’s permanent battlefield fixtures – tweet volume, frequency and serendipity – can always provide challenge. The combo deals a particular blow, however, when your latest tweet contains your big, hot breaking story.

What’s the best way to get followers to notice and click your link when big news hits? Should you break out the “BREAKING”? Should you stick with just “Breaking”? Or should you drop the chyron-bred word and bank on content sparking the spread?

Here are five distinct ways newsrooms on Twitter highlight breaking news, along with some questions to consider before adopting (or adapting) a new strategy for your own. Read more

Here’s some lunch-time fodder to consider. How reliant are you on social media to keep up on the latest news? How has this changed for you in the past decade?

To put this in perspective, think about this:

While both the old and new media clearly have a role in telling news stories (and especially the stories behind the news) today, social media has clearly become the way to find and share breaking news for a large portion of the population. This infographic from Schools.com uses info from a variety of sources, including the Pew Research Center’s recent report on “What Facebook and Twitter Mean For News“, to pretty aptly cover some of the seismic shifts taking place in the news industry, in particular how consumers receive their news.

This graphic tips at, but doesn’t seek to explain the bigger problem: Trust. With news spreading so swiftly, it’s hard to discern fact from fascination when people eager to break news share it before verifying it. But that’s a question that needs answered another day.

Here’s the full graphic: Read more

ESPN has a history of both breaking news and of less than social-media-friendly practices. In 2009, the network took heat for its guidelines that at the time banned talent from sports related commentary on social networks.

Obviously, a lot can change in two years and as the medium developed, so did ESPN and other sports reporters social media savvy. Today, those reporters are looked to precisely for their news and commentary on social networks.

Well, maybe not so much has changed. Last week, an updated set of social networking guidelines started circulating. And while some of the points are to-be-expected and valid:

Think before your tweet. … If you wouldn’t say it on the air or write it in a column, don’t post it on any social network.

Others seem to be keeping staff on too tight of a leash, and at least one item in the policy comes across incredibly short-sighted to anyone who produces news or follows those producers on social media.

Do not break news on Twitter. We want to serve fans in the social sphere, but the first priority is to ESPN news and information efforts. Public news (i.e. announced in news conferences) can be distributed with- out vetting. However, sourced or proprietary news must be vetted by the TV or Digital news desks. Once reported on an ESPN platform, that news can (and should) be distributed on Twitter and other social sites.

I had to check the calendar to make sure this document was really date stamped August 2011.
Read more

Google+ is the newest social media network on the block and, as we chronicled last week, there’s a lot of innovative ways it can help a reporter with their individual beat. But what about when it comes to breaking news, when the whole news team is helping cover a story?

Twitter and Facebook are well established as invaluable tools when it comes to sharing news at a moment’s notice but Google+ has gone untested — until last week. While covering an apartment shooting, the staff at the New Jersey-based paper the Trentonian was able to land a key source and very important information through Google+. Read more