Malachy Browne, managing editor at Reported.ly and previously of Storyful, shared his favourite tools for newsgathering on social media at the recent ONA Mobile event in London
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Social media is the first port of call for many journalists in a breaking news event, especially if they can't get to the scene.
At Reported.ly, founded recently to produce news directly to social networks, managing editor Malachy Browne is regularly scouring the social media landscape to find and verify news events.
He shared some of his go-to tools at last week's Online News Association Mobile event on Friday 6 March.
In the event of a breaking news story in a country with a lot of mobile connectivity and smartphones, Browne said he goes straight to Gramfeed to search for people uploading images of the event to Instagram.
"In the case of Charlie Hebdo one of the first videos was there when I opened [Gramfeed]," he said. "It was a minute or two old with a lot of gunfire on the street, which gives you information that it was a serious incident."
" CO Everywhere was designed for mobile and designed to find what's around you in terms of cafes, bars and whatever," said Browne, "but it's also really good for news gathering around breaking news stories."
Users can monitor specific areas marked by drawing a polygon on a map, then gather Instagram posts and tweets from a certain timespan.
Although SAM Desk doesn't have a free option like the other platforms, Browne said he still finds the social media search and curation platform useful, especially in terms of its search capabilities for Facebook.
Users can search by location or specific accounts, but also scan Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for specific types of media around topics.
"
Storyful Multisearch is a Chrome extension that allows you to very quickly skip a lot of steps," said Browne, "and it'll filter Twitter and YouTube for a lot of your search terms
."
Tumblr, Instagram and Spokeo are now available to search with the tool as well, and it's easy to narrow the search and get results with just a few clicks.
