To counteract this trend, French-American billionaire and founder of Ebay Pierre Omydiar created a new media, which intends to use social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter to collect information. The new venture, called Reported.ly, is part of First Look Media, the online media group owned by Omydiar.
Andy Carvin, who previously worked for the national public radio NPR in Washington, heads the project, which consists of 6 journalists spread all around the world. Carvin is best known for having covered the Arab Spring through his real time tweets. In an editorial published on 8th December 2014, he described the media’s objective: give people the opportunity to create news themselves and make their own contribution to change minds or rewrite history. The media’s journalists will “only” act as curators and aggregators.
Reported.ly also intends to create a new concept: the “decentralized news group”, in the sense that it won’t have its own website or platform: the team will only publish contents on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, as Carvin explained to Forbes recently:
“Many news organizations use their own social media presences to direct people away from those platform and consume content elsewhere (…). So we’re creating a news room that’s basically embedded on various platforms, engaging users throughout the course of the day.”
Reported.ly wants to double-check, in real time, the rumours that continuously spread on Twitter, to help readers sort out fact from fiction. Doing so, the news group wouldn’t only benefit from the social network’s real-time coverage of events, it would also provide a powerful curation tool.
Even if it is still too early to assess the quality of the venture’s coverage, this initiative may well achieve this combination of immediacy and relevance long sought after in the media world.