The Free Amina Hoax, discovered to be Thomas (Tom) J MacMaster.

Thanks in large part to the work of Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty, Andy Carvin, Liz Henry, and Jillian York, the Gay Girl in Damascus is no more.  But how do we move on?

In a brilliant and comprehensive post, Ethan Zuckerman rightly suggests that trust in citizen sources will be damaged, particularly those bloggers who hide their identities because they live in repressive regimes.  Those fighting hardest to get media out of countries like Syria will be badly hit. Regimes are able to once again portray citizen media as fabricated lies peddled by foreigners.  And activists promoting campaigns online will have to work doubly hard to win support.

But perhaps skepticism is a healthy thing. Perhaps we have needed a good dose of it for a while now.  What would be a positive outcome of increased skepticism about citizen media?

One thing that big media could do almost immediately is publish a nutritional guide to any article that relies substantially on citizen or unverified sources.  This could be published at the top of the article, and should contain two things: a statement of how confident the media outlet is of the source’s authenticity and the efforts that have been taken so far to establish that level of confidence.

This could take the form of a checklist that over time could evolve into a easily recognisable nutritional guide to news content, replete with little emblems or colour coding.

I imagine two checklists. First, the level of confidence:

1. We are working to verify this source but cannot assume it is authentic at this time
2. We have some reason to believe this source is authentic
3. We have strong reasons to believe this source is authentic
4. We have independently verified this source

Any source that is junk should be called out, but more importantly articles based on its output should be retracted or updated to remove the source.

Second, you need a checklist for steps taken to verify the citizen source:

1. Content Cross-referenced with other citizen media from same location and date
2. Email contact established with the source
3. Internet phone contact established with the source
4. Mobile phone contact established with the source
5. Video contact established with the source
6. Partner media outlet has met this source face-to-face
7. We have met this source face-to-face

Perhaps email contact or cross-referencing produces ‘We are working to verify this source but cannot assume it is authentic at this time’; perhaps a combination of email and internet phone contact produces ‘We have some reason to believe this source is authentic’; perhaps mobile or video contact produces ‘We have strong reasons to believe this source is authentic’; and face-to-face contact produces ‘We have independently verified this source’.

Often other news organisations provide some cover of credibility for a source. So when A Gay Girl in Damascus was covered by big media, it took off.   That’s why this nutritional check list should really evolve into a Media Sources Database, which the big media share (hence item 6. in the list above).

Imagine if all citizen sources appearing in articles published online by the top media outlets presented a link to a media sources database with all the key information regarding the authenticity of the source. For example, any description of communications sustained with that source by any of the big media.  This information could be made readily accessible in a javascript popup on the dynamic link to the source.

Taking steps to authenticate sources is as important as ever – perhaps more so now that sources can self-publish under so many different guises.  Big media could do more to represent to their audiences the level of confidence they have in that source and the steps taken to establish that level of confidence. Better still, they could share that information and make it readily available across multiple international audiences for the betterment of digital journalism.