The art of crafting a breaking news alert

My own experience centres around the importance of being quick to spot trends people are searching for, or are gaining traction on social media, verifying their accuracy, and imparting important information

Fake news is not just a phrase for sources we don’t like – as much as the US president may think it is. The two words actually point to an ever-growing problem in online journalism that quality publications have to constantly be wary of. Never more is such caution necessary than in breaking news situations.

“Breaking news” may conjure up images of reporters in the field, live in front of a camera, a finger pressed against their ear with a hurricane raging behind them or gunshots from a war zone.

Of course, we do have correspondents who handle breaking news this way at The Independent. But in actual fact my own experience of breaking news, from within the office’s audience team, centres more around the importance of being quick to spot trends people are searching for, or are gaining traction on social media, verifying their accuracy, and imparting important information as quickly and responsibly as possible .

As a member of the team working in the US, the most prevalent example of this for me is, sadly, shootings; in particular school shootings.

During the time I wrote the last four paragraphs, I have had two breaking news notifications about shootings at American schools. One appears to be a false alarm. The other has now evolved from reports of a school shooting (didn’t happen) into an alleged bitcoin email scam which has been making bomb threats to schools, government buildings, banks and more across the country. Already some publications are publishing stories about both of these incidents, with some brazenly branding both as school shootings – however, as far as I can tell at this moment, not a single gun has been fired.

So what do we as a news organisation do here?

We must be vigilant in our source-checking and hold back from publishing anything until we are certain of its accuracy. It can be easy to forget in breaking news scenarios that many readers will use our articles not just as sources of information, but to give guidance on safety procedures – and to check whether their children’s school is the one red flashing messages are saying there has been a mass shooting at. Remaining aware of our own authority is paramount, even as we scroll through videos posted by people on Twitter claiming that they’re under attack or take phone calls from people saying that they’re in a dangerous situation. Sometimes, in order to inform our readers while still maintaining caution about details we haven’t fully verified, we will choose to release breaking news of as little as a single sentence which will we update as information goes through our verification processes. That sentence then becomes an entire article and, if the threat is real, a live-blog following minute-by-minute updates on what’s happening.

Now I better go find out what’s going on with these bomb threats...

Yours,

Lucy Anna Gray

Assistant audience editor