Truly Media, a collaborative platform that ATC (Greece) and Deutsche Welle (Germany) co-developed to support journalists in the verification of content residing in social networks, will be used by German Press Agency dpa and BR (Bayerischer Rundfunk, part of the ARD network of public service broadcasters), to aggregate and verify user generated content (UGC) for their coverage of the German federal elections in September. The platform has already been proven a useful tool for Deutsche Welle’s (DW) editorial teams for over 6 months period.
“We are using Truly Media to verify eyewitness content following the latest trends in technology. This helps us standardise and document all our verification efforts in a harmonised way across editorial departments”, says Mr. Stefan Primbs, Head of Social Listening and Verification at BR. In addition, according toMr. Stefan Voss, Head of the verification team at dpa , “Truly Media can help us to better coordinate our team efforts around verification. It thereby improves transparency along the workflow, for all teams involved.”
Truly Media lets journalists verify photos, videos, or social media accounts in real-time. Journalists can select the most important items for their story, and verify each item individually using a verification checklist and integrated third-party verification tools like Google Maps or TinEye.
This can be done in collaboration within a single newsroom, across different media companies, or together with individual journalists working anywhere in the world.
Some of the key assets of Truly.Media: verifying social media items collaboratively within and across teams and boundaries; this happening transparently and in real-time; integrating and providing state-of-the art tools and technologies; and taking journalistic workflows and requirements fully into account by providing a demand-driven solution.
Disclaimer: Truly Media is an integrated web application that is scheduled for full commercial release in October 2017. It has been co-developed by ATC (Greece) and Deutsche Welle (Germany). It builds on work carried out in EC co-funded research projects, in particular REVEAL, and is currently supported by Google´s DNI Fund (Digital News Initiative).