- The Minnesota Star Tribune is the news outlet best positioned to cover the chaos in the Twin Cities.
- But there are lots of people covering it, including ordinary citizens whose videos get posted immediately on the internet.
- That's a challenge for Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey, who has to figure out how to compete with … everybody.
The Minnesota Star Tribune is the state's biggest newspaper, and has been doing an excellent job of covering every angle of "Operation Metro Surge" — the federal government's mass deportation effort that started in December.
But it is also competing in a real-time news environment where everyone is a reporter, and cellphone videos and social media posts are widely distributed. I first saw the killing of protester Alex Pretti via a Reddit post someone sent to me Saturday morning.
That poses a challenge for Kathleen Hennessey, the paper's top editor: In a world where everyone can see everything — or, at least, lots of things — in close to real time, what can her publication do to set itself apart?
I talked to Hennessey about what her outlet does well — and what it's not doing, at least yet — earlier this week for my Channels podcast. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation.
Peter Kafka: This is a story that's being covered by lots of different sources, including lots of individuals posting videos from their phones. How do you handle reporting on a video that lots of people have already seen, and seems quite clear? How many checks do you have to do before you can say "This is what happened" as opposed to "There's a video that appears to show this?"
Kathleen Hennessey: We are very careful. We know that a video that appears to show something does not mean that that is exactly what happened. Our language is careful. And we recognize we're not going to have every single video first, obviously.
Our job is to verify it, and to watch it closely, and to slow it down a thousand times, to try to get the rights to it, and to call the lawyers, and figure out who took it. To do the hard work.
And inevitably, that just means that we'll be slower than social media. But we'll be more accurate and more careful and fuller.
What do you say to readers who say, "I'm seeing this thing on Reddit or Instagram. Why don't you guys have it?"
As a journalist, it never feels good to have somebody send you an account and say, "See? Look, this is what happened!" And you have to say, "Yeah, I guess we're not quite reporting it that way. Yet." We're all competitive, and we know the importance of speed, but we're really trying to hold to our process here.
You've mentioned that your staff spends time chasing "ghosts" —stories that might be real, or not. What's an example of that?
A lot of the story, as everyone knows, is being reported through these Signal channels that various activists and neighborhood groups are on. And they're saying, "ICE reported here, ICE reported there." And you either get there instantly, or you are there in the aftermath. And they maybe were there, or maybe it was just somebody else in a rental car …
I just think that's the nature of this. It's a hard story to cover that way. I think we're better positioned than some outlets because we're just closer to the community. We know these neighborhoods. We know what's real, what's not. We have had some luck in getting ahead of that and getting better and more solid information first.
Have you thought about saying, "Look, if this stuff is going to exist on social media, why don't we find some way of collecting it for our readers, because most normal people don't see all of the videos? We can say it's not verified, but you ought to see it."
We're having those conversation.I don't think people come to us for unverified information. Right? Our job is to show them what is verified and what is real.
And we've all had that experience where we've seen a video on social media and then we ask, "Wait, what is that?" And then we go Google the real thing.
Our job is to be additive and to confirm and to name places and dates and locations and get reaction and comment from federal law enforcement officials and others. To really paint the fuller picture.
So we are not yet at the point where we're trying to just gobble up all the [user-generated video], and throw it on our site and say "Here." But we are collecting a lot of it, for the production of journalism, going forward.
The post 'Slow it down a thousand times': How the Minnesota Star Tribune covers the ICE story playing out on social media. appeared first on Business Insider
