Another warm Friday evening, another attack on civilians and another spate of live streaming..
Following the Nice attacks I put together a blog for the BBC on the risk to objective journalism from the exponential rise of live-streaming on social media.
Last night in the immediate aftermath of the shooting at a Munich shopping mall video on Periscope and Facebook was once again widely visible across the media.
There’s no doubt that live-streaming of these events is both useful and disruptive to news media organisations. As wildly confusing events unfold before us and we have little capacity to report from the scene immediately this video provides unique access. It’s also (in many cases) however, not owned, managed or directed by journalists but by members of the public who are often afraid and unschooled in providing context and perspective on the drama before them.
Facebook have published their “News Feed Values” and Periscope have “Community Standards” too. Much of this, however, remains a little vague and open to interpretation by news media and individuals.
The videos we use across our rolling TV coverage on the BBC are watched and assessed by members of my User Generated Content (UGC) team before they are injested for live relay on our output. We also spend some time discussing what the video is showing (whether there’s anything graphic or disturbing in the live-stream) and do not simply ‘go live’ to an ongoing broadcast.
However, there continue to be risks inherent in using this footage for us all. It’s rare to be able to talk to the uploader (owner of the live-stream) to assess their safety or well-being before using the footage or to talk to them about exactly how they are filming the events or how they came to be there. Much of the footage we see is often passed around by different users and, in the confusion, incorrectly labelled. In short, it’s a very confusing picture and easy to be tripped up.
The age of live-streaming is well and truly upon us all. We can’t live in the past but we can think carefully about context and perspective and, as journalists, redouble our efforts to explain and analyse rather than simply play back the raw emotion of what we’re presented.
