Skeleton Stories: Selling the Bones of Content

One of my first paid jobs in social media a number of years ago was a short stint as a content curator for a company on-selling potential news-stories to large media companies.

My job was to create skeletons of news stories, an incongruous mixture of repackaging videos of war gore, and posting videos of kittens doing funny things, all for the benefit of other news outlets.

“Good morning everyone! What events and issues should I be scanning today?”

My first tweet of the morning would be posted from my iPhone, while I was still in bed. The response was always a predictable flood of news links, mostly useless, old links or tinfoil-hat news items: fluoride in the drinking water and aliens allegedly discovered living in a basement.

My first search term of the day was always the hashtag #protest.

The hashtag would unfurl before me, thousands of tweets. Protests in Bulgaria against energy prices. Self-immolations in Tibet. Protests in Melbourne for refugees. Protests in Germany for privacy reforms. Protests in Spain against austerity. Flickering between YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google — a sea of humans content dispensers, untrustworthy and unverified.

Protest never ends, and there’s always a protest, somewhere in the world. Somewhere, someone is always unhappy, if you’re looking.

Work in earnest would start from the kitchen table, laptop open, Tweetdeck scrolling with tweets from the six thousand people I follow on Twitter, plus 80-something columns of search terms.

It was always a race to publish, to be the first to package content and post it.

A typical post would involve the following process:

I’d locate an image of a bleeding protester, and run the image through Google Image Search to check that the photo hadn’t been sourced from elsewhere. I’d message the photographer asking permission to use the photograph, with credit.

Create a photo-caption: “Protesters brutally beaten by police during anti-austerity demonstration.”

Check the buildings in the background of the picture, flick to Google Earth and see if the buildings in the region matched the images in the photo.

Check the skyline in the photo, check the weather forecast for region and see if they matched.

Google the background of the event. Find the links to the activist website posted by the organiser of the protest. Write up a three-paragraph description of events. Link the geo-location data into the write-up. Link the photo-credit for the photographer.

Most of the time people were so grateful to have their content uploaded to a “professional” news site they didn’t even bother to ask if we’d pay them. Which was a relief, because it was embarrassing to have to explain my employer wasn’t willing to pay anything for their photos and videos. I was only making around minimum wage myself.

Hit UPLOAD.

My first news skeleton of the morning: done. Then I’d search down another 7 to 10 similar photos or videos, and upload them as well.

21st century news content aggregation and curation…

I never knew exactly who my employer’s clients were. Sure, content curators like to think of themselves as journalists, but like all staff at content curation groups - including Storyful, Grasswire and Reportedly — they’re also open source intelligence analysts.

I could’ve been scanning for well, anyone. I preferred not to think about it too hard.

It was galling enough knowing some senior journalist at a mainstream print media company was adding details to my story, along with his name, and probably being paid twice as much as I was.

Each day was spent wading through images of human suffering. There’s a fine line when it comes to posting images of violence. Too much gore, and the images can’t be published in the mainstream media. Too little and someone will complain a different outlet has more exciting than we were posting.

Early in the morning of the Boston bombing I received a message from my boss. “Where are you? Why aren’t you looking at Twitter? Can you look at Reddit, maybe for a guy with a black backpack?”

I typed in “Boston” into the Twitter search function. My screen filled with images of broken bodies. I uploaded half a dozen different images and videos of gore from the Boston bombing, but I don’t think any of it ever made it into the mainstream news.

During my job induction my employer gave me a list of YouTube channels from the Middle East, mostly from Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Bahrain and Syria.

The first time I flicked my brand new YouTube subscriber stream open I ran to the bathroom and puked. Dead babies, rotting bloated corpses of elderly men, women with their faces scratched off, starving children, bombs falling on houses…

It was a stream of death and despair uploaded to YouTube and nobody prints the images in the newspapers. The videos are too gory to play on the nightly news for the general public. It felt useless to even upload screenshots behind the company paywall, knowing newspapers weren’t covering the events.

One of the final videos I watched from Syria was a small, shell-shocked infant, in dirty clothes and with a bandage on her head, sitting on a couch, clutching a ragged teddy bear. The sole survivor of a bomb blast that killed her entire family, supposedly in Aleppo, Syria.

“What’s your name darling? Say your name?”, intoned a male voice in the background. “She doesn’t even know her name…”

It was propaganda and nobody was going to play it on the nightly news.

She couldn’t have been more than two years old. Maybe too young and traumatised to speak. Her cheeks still carried toddler fat, despite her underweight body mass. A look of confusion in her bright eyes.

I couldn’t verify where the infant was from. Couldn’t verify the date of the incident. Couldn’t verify the story. I couldn’t even verify her name. I couldn’t use the content. Whoever she was, she was lost in the sea of unverifiable content.

That afternoon I snapped the laptop screen shut and marched down to the local park with my son in the pram.

In the afternoon sunshine my son played on the swings. I closed my eyes in the warmth.

Within two more months, I’d quit.

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