Social media and journalism: Storyful

But that old-school background has given me a keener understanding of the seismic shift in the news business. Believe it or not, it has fuelled my enthusiasm for the brave new world of 'social journalism'.

When I started out as a reporter, my job was to dig up scarce, precious facts and deliver them to an audience at an appointed time. Today, there is an unimaginable surplus of data and that audience is actively doing its own reporting.

Journalists the world over are struggling to cope with a tsunami of 'user generated content', to use a media catchphrase phrase. Twitter and YouTube threaten to overwhelm news organisations who can't master their potential.

A common mistake is to obsess over the shiny technology that seems to drive this profound change and miss out on the need for human beings. All those algorithms, apps and search engines are useful but they can never replace value judgements at the core of good journalism.

My focus is not on technology but innovation. In other, helping change the way journalists think about their role in a changed world.

To begin with, they need to get used to being 'curators'; sorting news from the noise on the web using smart new tools and good old fashioned reporting skills.

I find it helps to break this word 'curation' into three central questions:

* Discovery: How do we find the best news content on the web?

* Verification: How do we make sure we can trust it?

* Delivery: How do we turn that content into stories for a changing audience?

Without a doubt, verification is the greatest challenge. It's also the greatest opportunity for a new breed of 'social journalists' willing to work outside traditional news organisations and perhaps even create their own.

With some like-minded souls, I founded Storyful in early 2010. We wanted to be the first news agency purpose-built for the age of Twitter and YouTube. Our objective was to help others discover, verify and deliver the most valuable content on the social web.

By late January 2011, we had formed a partnership with YouTube, finding and validating the defining videos from the escalating protests in Egypt and beyond for its CitizenTube channel.

It wasn't until the early bloom of the 'Arab Spring' that I could see the practical impact of our work. I can even remember a light-bulb moment, when one of our curators described to me the process that led us to post this video on January 28th.

It shows a pitched battle between riot police and protestors on the Qasr al Nile bridge in Cairo. The video was shot by Mohamed Ibrahim el Masry, who was staying at a hotel overlooking the bridge.

Our curators discovered the video on Facebook and quickly contacted Mohamed to confirm he was the original creator of this remarkable footage.

The team used Google Earth to check the location of the bridge and Mohamed's vantage point. They compared Mohamed's video with other 'user-generated content' shot on ground level.

Finally, the curator asked Mohamed for his permission to upload the video to YouTube and pass it on news organisations. Mohamed sought only a credit in exchange for the free use of his video.

Of course, I have left out the most important part of this process, what we at Storyful have come to know as the 'Human Algorithm': the process that helps us discover the wisdom in that vast social media crowd.

Every news event in the age of social media creates more than a conversation - it creates a community. When news breaks, a self-selecting network gathers to talk about the story. Some are witnesses, others are fact-checkers and in every group are the filters, the people who everyone else looks to for judgement.

At the outset of the Egyptian revolution, the community began with a relatively small group of activists who shared all the eye-witness images and accounts on Twitter and Facebook. The community evolved to include supporters and analysts in other countries. Eventually, that community would include foreign correspondents who flocked to Tahrir Square.

Twitter helps map out the membership of these kinds of communities and channel their 'real-time' reporting, debating and verifying. Most news organisations look on as passive observers. But that is not enough. The only way to unlock the power of the human algorithm is to be a part of it.

One of the greatest advantages of the human algorithm is that it doesn't stop working at deadline. In the old days, journalists only worried if a story was true at the time it was published. Real-time news communities continue to refine and fact-check and verify, and as the community grows its ability to refine the story grows exponentially.

All of this is tricky for mainstream media organisations, which were designed around deadlines, detachment and clear divisions between reporter and audience. Essentially, reporters have been trained to be a breed apart. Getting rid of that assumption is the first step towards genuine innovation.

But it is the oldest journalistic skill of all which gives this process meaning and that is engagement. It is the skill most easily overlooked in the rush towards a brand new journalism: the supreme importance of interaction between two human beings.

Mark Little is a journalist and founder of the website storyful.com. He recently spoke at the BBC's Social Media Summit, where journalists from many different news organisations shared their thoughts on how best to harness the mass of information that's out there. This article is based on what Mark said at the conference, and applies to a 24-hour news operation like 5 live.