OUTCOME
Storyful monitored the city of Mosul from the time it was overrun by IS fighters, through to the battle to retake the city. During this time, we developed a methodology for monitoring the release of new content.
The result of the work was a feed of useful verified content from inside the city during its occupation. For Storyful’s news partners, this meant verified content, information about the source and their motivations, information about the content itself, the people in the videos and the weapons and tactics seen in the video. Storyful also provided guidance around how the material could potentially be used for reporting purposes. While we deemed most of the content as essentially public domain, or rights free, given how it was produced, and how it was intended for dissemination, we also flagged videos that were graphic, or needed to be treated with editorial caution.
This case study shows how Storyful’s approach to tracking a story like this allowed our journalists to gain an understanding of IS’s media tactics, prefered publishing methods and accounts.
Storyful identified IS’s media arms, including content publishers in each of the militant group’s provinces or wilayats, or centralised publications, including online magazines and weekly newspapers. Some of these are listed below.
This level of understanding was central to quickly finding and making sense of content of this kind.