Chris Shipley is intrigued by the relationship between the abundance and anonymity of social media creators and the reader’s role as consumer, curator, and amplifier of digital information. During her fellowship, she explored the challenges of identifying credible sources and reporting breaking news in real-time through social media channels. Working with students from the Missouri School of Journalism, she developed best practice guidelines to enhance real-time social journalism.

Those guidelines can be found at the following sites:

1. Twitter4News
2. Common Tags

Shipley concluded her fellowship with a social journalism hackathon in San Francisco. The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, in partnership with the Public Media Platform (PMP) and KQED, challenged teams of developers, journalists and innovative thinkers to build new tools, business models and new services to help journalists better report and deliver quality news and information in a fast-moving social and mobile media environment. These teams developed more than a dozen ideas during the course of a weekend.

She will continue to develop ideas seeded during her fellowship. She is currently conducting diligence on a startup concept to support journalists as the news industry continues to transition to new business models.