Hurricane Harvey coverage shows critical role of newsroom geolocation tools
The importance of cutting-edge newsroom technology was made evident from our coverage of Hurricane Harvey. RTDD utilized the latest tools in geolocated content discovery to monitor the storm’s damage in real-time, as areas affected rapidly increased.
With news of the storm developing in a high-density population area, accurate geolocation was vital in allowing us to follow the storm’s destructive path.
Using SAM — a platform for discovering and curating eyewitness social media UGC (User Generated Content) — RTDD was able to concentrate on Port Aransas, 200 miles south of Houston, where the storm made landfall on Saturday.
SAM collected all social media geolocated to that specific area (shown in the below screengrab).

Video of the storm from the Texas coast provided RTDD with a full appreciation of its strength as it began its journey to the mainland.
As the storm approached Galveston, some 50 miles south of Houston, we used SAM’s in-built polygon tool to ensure we were getting social media posts geolocated to that area only.

As news broke of storm damage from several areas simultaneously, we used the tool to focus on each area, collecting the most important UGC as it was uploaded.
The below content was gathered when we focused geolocation over the University of Houston.
When covering events that evolve at speed, having both the innovative tools and a skilled team allows RTDD to rapidly discover UGC and verify its authenticity.
The below content was found using SAM — verified as belonging to Russell G.Little, who provided us with permission to use it.
Based on dialogue with Little, we verified the content was filmed from the MKT Bar at One Park Place in Houston, as seen on Google Maps.
We combined SAM’s geolocation with SnapChat’s Snap Map feature, which provides a heatmap of shared content. We focused SnapChat’s in-built heatmap on Houston because of the city’s population density.
Snap Maps poses difficulties contacting the uploader and, in turn, raises ethical issues about extracting the content for usage without permission, however.

In an incident like Hurricane Harvey content is often falsely geolocated to an area by people who are not in that area.
The below image, circulated widely online, was described as showing a shark in the floodwater in Houston. This uploader’s account is geo-tagged as Houston, Texas.
Another uploader with a Twitter account geo-tagged as Scotland, gathered thousands of retweets with the same fake image.
SAM helped us debunk this fake image in seconds by providing data collected about the source and their posting habits. This data helps our newsroom to verify an uploader’s authenticity — an operation that without the tool could take hours.
Our coverage of Hurricane Harvey, as it made landfall in Texas, was aided by our use of dynamic, innovative tools helping us to provide informative visuals for our audience while also providing source details that initiate the verification process.
