5 free tools for newsgathering on Instagram by Alastair Reid.
From the post:
Instagram yesterday announced that it now has more than 400 million users around the world — that’s a 100 million growth in the last nine months and almost 90 million more than Twitter.
Over half of these new additions live in Europe and Asia, according to a release from the Facebook-owned social network for photos and videos, with the most new users coming from Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.
So what does this mean for journalists? In short, there are even more sources for stories. The first images to appear online from the attack on a Tunisian beach resort in June were posted by an Instagram user, and were a valuable contribution to understanding the facts as news broke.
Instagram only launched a (somewhat limited) search function for its website in July and despite announcing new search tool Signal last week Facebook has yet to widely release the platform.
So In the mean time, here are some useful tools for finding newsworthy material on Instagram.And remember, any newsworthy material found online should always be verified and used responsibly, subjects we will continue to cover here at First Draft.
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I haven’t thought of Instagram as a source of technical information but if you were building a topic map of current events, it could well be a great source of visual information.
Try out the tools that Alastair mentions to see which ones suit your information gathering needs and style.