Markham Nolan calls himself a “literary mercenary” whose major responsibility is “to sift through news and information to see what’s true and what’s not.”
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Markham Nolan, the managing editor of Storyful.com, has watched journalism “evolve from the pursuit of finding facts to the act of verifying those floating in the ether.” He points out that by the end of his talk, “there will be 864 more hours of video on YouTube and 2.5 million more photos on Facebook and Instagram.”
In this TEDTalk Nolan shares the “investigative techniques” he and his team at Storyful employ to verify information in real-time, “to let you know if that Statue of Liberty image has been doctored or if that video leaked from Syria is legitimate.”
He says:
Truth is emotional, it’s fluid, and above all, it’s human. No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you’ll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise.