If a building were to collapse in the middle of a city, anyone on the scene would take their smart phone and start recording. But what makes this content news? Or, when a picture or video appears on social networks that portrays a shocking news event, don’t broadcasters have an obligation to run the material?

These are the kind of situations faced by newsrooms every day and there are tools being developed that will assure the video of the falling building can be used as news and that the content online is what it appears to be.

Most recently, the platform Verify Media being developed by DW’s innovation projects, received financial support from Google’s Digital News Initiative. The initiative is a ongoing collaboration between Google and European news publishers that supports quality journalism through innovation. The aim of Verify Media is to simplify the process of verifying potential newsworthy content on social networks.

DW’s innovation team is also part of ongoing projects like Reveal, which develops tools and services that aid in social media verification. InVID (In Video Veritas) is a project dedicated to verifying user-generated videos.

DW is very active in improving social media verification and will continue to set trends and introduce ideas to improve the future of journalism.