Reporting In Chaos: Why NYT Visual Investigations Are So Important
The NYT’s Visual Investigations Team does vital work — verifying information and bringing clarity to chaos. We need more of this type of journalism.
Protests, riots, conflicts: chaotic situations are vacuums of information. There’s little conventional reporting on them, because they’re so difficult to cover properly.
And what information does come out is via social media. It’s difficult to verify, especially for the layperson trying to work out what’s going on as they scroll through Twitter, and laden with misinformation and disinformation: edited or old photos, and videos captured in other places and at other events.
There are techniques to identify misinformation and narrow down the mass of material into what is real and what is not, of course. Through reverse image searches, you can pretty easily establish when a picture was taken and if it’s been seen on the internet before. Once you have some verified images, you can cross-reference other images and footage with these, or use geolocation to pinpoint where images and footage were taken.
These techniques are mostly quite straightforward — though geolocation is slightly more technically complex. The…
