Solving the Ghost Boat mystery
CUNY and Columbia journalism students learn verification and investigative techniques in search for 243 missing people
By Carrie Brown @brizzyc
Journalists at Medium have invited the public to help them find a boat full of refugees that disappeared without a trace en route to Italy in June of 2014.
On Saturday, journalism students from two New York City-based journalism schools got hands-on practice with techniques for corroborating eyewitness media, finding geolocated social media material, working with weather data and more from experts from Storyful, Eyewitness Media Hub and Medium as they worked to solve the case.
Finding out what happened to the refugees, most of them from the North African nation of Eritrea, requires both on-the-ground reporting and painstaking digital work mining for any clues to their whereabouts.
Spurred to help by stories from family members desperately searching for their missing loved ones, people from all over the world have chipped in to help, offering an inspiring example of the power of the crowd to help in journalistic work.
Working from a list of people believed to have been on the boat, students combed social profiles for any clues.
Just four percent of all social media material is geolocated, Claire Wardle of Eyewitness Media and the Tow Center at Columbia University explained, but finding some can be invaluable. LatLong.net allows you to get coordinates for any address, which is helpful for searching.
She recommended turning to Google for a more powerful search within Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube than you get on the sites themselves.
“Never underestimate the power of social media to connect you to individuals in some of the most remote locations in the world,” participant Annie Hylton told me on Slack. “The importance of using cross-verification and geo-location tools to investigate potential witnesses and leads on a live story of this magnitude was particularly noteworthy.”
Other tips cited by Wardle included using Wolfram Alpha for past weather data and ensuring you are using the right keywords in your search, which may often include slang. Medium has developed a database of possible keywords relevant to the Ghost Boat investigation.
Tracking ships and social networks for seafarers
Giannina Segnini, a visiting professor at Columbia, showed us the many databases that can be used to track ships. While the Ghost Boat, with its illegal cargo of people, was likely unregistered and therefore untrackable, finding other boats in port at the same time might lead to witnesses who could be questioned.
The way to begin to understand ships is IMO’s Global Integrated Shipping Information System, Segnini said. Ships all have a unique IMO number that never changes, which can be used to find owners and mangers. MarineTraffic.com can be used to track ships.
There are also social networks for seafarers, including Crew Too, MyShip.com, and SeaFolks. According to Segnini, sailors are constantly sharing impressions in real time, and you can search by vessel.
A valuable experience
As the director of CUNY’s MA program in social journalism, I was thrilled my students could participate and that we could help sponsor the event. (Thanks to our friends at the Hoffman Foundation which paid for the pizza for hungry investigators.)
Verification of social media is a vital skill for journalism students today, and the only way to learn it is to actually get your hands dirty and practice it by working on a real case. Columbia student Ben Conarck said that while he had learned about tricks like using geolocation in class, this was his first chance to try these techniques in a meaningful way and he was struck by how useful they are.
Big thanks to Medium and especially social journalism student and Medium intern Rachel Glickhouse who did a lot of hard work to coordinate this event. She said:
“I think my biggest takeaway was how invested and engaged everyone was. We got a lot of great questions about the project and the process, and the sentiment was that this is really a unique investigation. Also, people felt that collaboration was really important, and rarely used to the extent we are using it, particularly among both news organizations and the audience.”
