Evaluation of Social Media Sources

nominalize. "Unknown." 11/5/2014 via pixabay. CC0 Public Domain. 

In looking in Storify, I found two articles that pertain to my discussion topic, "Facebook Adds Organ Donor Option to Timeline" and "Facebook is Urging Members to Add Organ Donor Status," and I will analyze the sources in the blog post. I will be analyzing the credibility, location of the author, their networking, contextual updates, as well as the age and reliability of the source.

The first article I will be discussing is "Facebook Adds Organ Donor Option to Timeline."

• How credible is the author?

Todd Wasserman is the Business and Marketing Editor for Mashable. He has been writing professionally for 20 years and was editor for other business as well. There is more on his credentials on the Mashable site. He is quite popular on his twitter page and has had many professional jobs before the one at Mashable. He was replaced after working at Mashable for four years. 

He is a credible author as he has been hired by many higher profile news sites such as the New York times. Here is another place to view his job history. 

• Is he is the place that he is writing about?

The event didn't really have an official place. It was a release on the internet, so any place that had internet service would have been impacted by this event, especially the people waiting on the organ transplant list. So in this case, he was at the place the event took place. If anything, he was even more into what was going on than most being being that he must have to spend much of his time following current events online. This is a big story for news writer, and he was probably on top of the action. 

• Who is within his network of followers?

He is highly associated with the Mashable company and has a lot of followers on that site as well. His job descriptions shows that he probably receives a lot of views. He has 19.5 K followers on Twitter as well. This means that he is well followed which means he is probably well in "the know" as to current events and the like since he known for being a news writer on internet sites. 

Other places he worked as an editor include Brandweek, Computer Retail Week, and he was a reporter at The North Jersey Herald and News. 

• Can his content be collaborated by other sources?

His information can be collaborated by other sources. The other scholarly articles I read also said that Facebook did allow members to put their organ donor status. His post was more informational about the breaking news of Facebook doing this. This article was posted at the time that this story was considered breaking news. He also included information about the CEO of Facebook's partial reason for adding this into their website. 

You can even check Facebook for yourself and verify that this option actually exists. 

• Do they usually Tweet or post information about this topic?

It doesn't seem like he has a lot of personal feeling invested in this topic since his twitter page never really talks about it. It seems like his twitter page is a lot of random stuff with the occasional article or informational post added in. To him, this was a news story to report on at the time, but not an event that he would, or did, continue to follow up upon. 

• What is the age of the account?

He continues to update his Twitter page frequently it seems, but the article he wrote on the organ donor status is about 3 years old. Like I mentioned earlier, it was a news story for him to report on at the time, but nothing to elaborate on much. But it was very informative about how to actually perform the task of updating your organ status. 

A lot of the more in depth articles did not even mention this, which I feel would be one of the most important things to talk about especially if the writer is trying to promote the increased number of organ donors. 

• Is the source of the information reliable?

Mashable, according the the Times, is one of the top 25 blogs and is considered to be the main place to look for all of your social media needs. So considering this topic is primarily about Facebook, Mashable should be a good place to look for this sort of information. 

Now moving on to the second article..

• How credible is the author?

There are two authors of this post, Matt Richtell and and Kevin Sack. Matt Richtell is an novelist as well as a news article writer. He wrote the book "A Deadly Wondering" which was a true story of a mystery that brought an investigation as to what technology is doing to our brains. He is a prize winning author as well as he has his own blog. He is what I would consider a credible author. Kevin Sack shared a Pulitzer Prize for Nation Reporting for an article he wrote for the New York Times. This kind of award gives him credibility as an author. 

• Are they in the place the article was written about?

This goes along the same idea as the other article. This event did not necessarily take place at a physical place, but online. As long they were tuned into what was happening with social media, they were as close to the action as anybody with a computer. They just knew how to seek out of the information better than most. 

• Who is within their network of followers?

For this particular article, anyone who is interested in the New York times would have seen their article online. People with more of a vested interest in the topic would probably be more likely to look up this particular article. These people include doctors or people waiting on the transplant list. 

• Can their content be collaborated by other sources?

This was ultimately saying what many of the other articles I was looking at said. If one did enough research on the topic, they are bound to find information on more scholarly sources to verify the facts. 

• Do the writers usually update information about the source?

This Times article does not seem to have an links to updated information on this article, and the authors are not only focused on this topic but many other things, for example the next new story or something to do with Richtell's book or blog. 

• What is the age of the account?

It seems that Richtell still updates his blog pretty currently, so he is still an active writer. Like the other article, this article was written in 2012, when this was still breaking news, but now that the buzz is starting to settle down, The New York Times is off to bigger and better stories about things that are happening in the now. This was not really posted in an account but must have been linked by someone in their account. 

That is another beauty of social media. You do not necessarily have to write your own story on the event , but spread someone else's story on it who writes and researches for a living. 

• Is this a reliable source of information?

The New York Times is considered to be a reliable source of information for many news seekers and, in my opinion, is considered to be a reliable source.