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The Social Media News Revolution: One-On-One with @universalhub

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It was pouring rain on a Wednesday afternoon when I sat down at Foley’s in the South End with Adam Gaffin, aka @universalhub. We were both dripping wet and armed with all the supplies we needed: laptops and smartphones, and both of us seemed to be running on very little sleep.

The night before was the first night that Twitter blew up with news from #Ferguson, Missouri, and if I didn’t already feel more like my old journalist self again, sitting with Gaffin and talking at warp speed about the way we ingest news nowadays made it so. He needs no introduction: @universalhub, the biggest source of real-time news in Greater Boston, convener of crowdsourced iPhone reports and hero of citizen journalism, especially via social media.

In short: we bro’d out for a very long time.

How did you start Universal Hub? Was it something you planned or did it just sort of happen?

I’ve been a reporter and editor all my adult life. I basically started doing it as a hobby. I was doing early Internet stuff at a paper out in Framingham and then at a tech publication. This was back in the days when you could spend an afternoon and get a list of literally every Internet site in all of New England—because there were only like a hundred of them back then.

And then that became too hard. So I had a directory site, and I started reading these newfangled blog things. There were some really good writers in the Boston area. And I just thought it would be cool to do a digest of what people were talking about.

Now, it’s more of a news thing. It’s been fascinating to watch, because it’s a two-way thing: I couldn’t do what I’m doing without all these people on Twitter sending me stuff. Like just before I came here someone was like, “Why is Brigham and Women’s on Code Black?”

That’s a major hospital blackout—and I only know that because of Twitter.

Yeah, it’s crowdsourcing news…

It is!

When I started in journalism, it was very much like you’re standing on a mountaintop yelling the news down at people. And occasionally they call you up in the newsroom. But it was really one -> many. Now it’s a conversation. Which is very interesting.

I’ll post something and people react to it instantly. And a lot of times—most times— people know way more about things than I do. So one small tweet becomes a story.

What things do you find people in Boston talking about the most?

The T, bicycles ….and South Boston. People in South Boston hate me, people outside of South Boston hate South Boston. It’s this bizarre thing: you post something you think is innocuous about god knows what about South Boston and it becomes this major flame war.

Really?? Like what?

Pretty much everything I write about. You know, developmental. South Boston is having all these housing projects go up. It’s absurd. In South Boston there’s this very distinct Townie vs. Yuppie thing going on. And it’s fascinating to watch.

You get kind of depressed, but even The [Boston] Globe had this thing last week: how are you going to go on without one-week resident permit parking in South Boston? It became, again, Townies vs. Yuppies. The reason they don’t have seven-day passes now is because 15 years ago the Townies didn’t want it. There were no Yuppies 15 years ago. But now there’s too many people parking, so they’re going to try to keep the Yuppies out. The area is really split.

Have you ever played Sim City? There are a couple streets, like Boylston Street in the Fenway, and the whole Seaport area in South Boston. I remember when both of them were just parking lots. It’s like watching Sim City in slow motion. You’ve got these 20-story skyscrapers going up. And then there’s an entire other part of the city, down by Hyde Park and West Roxbury and Dorchester—where nothing ever happens. It’s just this weird split in the city.

Is there anything that you don’t retweet?

Yes. This is becoming more of an issue now that more people are following my feed. It’s a similar issue with anonymous comments on my site. I’m not going to retweet racist stuff. I’m not going to retweet just garbage. I have to be more careful now. A couple years ago when I was retweeting stuff, it wasn’t an issue. Now I’m seeing more and more of that: this racist reaction. Unfortunately there’s a lot of crime in Dorchester and Roxbury. So I’ll post something about someone being stabbed or shot, and on the website it’s more, “Oh the suspects aren’t yuppies? What a surprise!” The same thing on Twitter. I’m not going to let that stuff through. Well, I’m sure you’ve seen people getting sick of me posting rainbow photos. 

It’s one thing to complain about all the rainbow pictures I tweet, but when you start tweeting personal attacks, no I’m not going to retweet. Sorry.

rainbow_hub

Do you ever deal with times when you retweet something and you find out it’s wrong info? What I’m trying to get at is, do you verify stuff?

Early on I got caught a couple times pretty badly. As a reporter, yes, I do have to be careful. The advantage of Twitter is that if you make a mistake you can correct it really quickly. The disadvantage of Twitter is that it seems like a lot of times people will still see the original tweet, and then they’ll react to it before you’ve had a chance to correct. So the correction mechanism isn’t perfect. What I’ll do in cases like that, where I make a mistake—if it’s relatively soon after I’ve tweeted I’ll just delete the tweet and post a new tweet—but if people have already started reacting to it, I’ll do a public reply, and then I’ll started messaging people in private if I’m connected with them.

What I found during the #MarathonBombings is that you can tell after a while—if you wait and watch what’s being said and tweeted—you can TELL when the truth comes out. Would you agree?

Yes, there’s that. Also, there’s one thing I got caught on early on when I listened to the scanners all the time: Never tweet what the dispatcher on the scanner says, because she is just relaying what she’s hearing from cars. And there ARE people who make hoax calls to the Boston Police—I don’t understand it, but they do. Or there are issues where it sounds like gun fire but they get there and it turns out it’s just fireworks.

What I’ve learned is, once the cops show up at a scene and they say, “Yes, we have a gunshot victim,” or, “Yes we’ve found ballistics,” THEN I’ll start tweeting it.

Especially with crime news now, because I know people do follow me for that. A minute or five minutes isn’t going to make a difference for that.

In terms of the Marathon, the worst part was—I heard it—one of the police frequencies named that kid from Brown and some other name. And you know, when you hear it on the scanner… but in this case, it wasn’t true. So yeah, you do have to be careful. That also taught me a good lesson that you can’t trust Reddit nationally. The local Reddit though, they are good people. They’re a little hot-headed, but you know, that’s why you’re on Reddit (Laughs). But in terms of what they find, always check out what they say, but it’s not national stuff. In fact, while the national one was naming that Brown student, the guys in Boston were buying pizzas for the first responders. It’s just not what you think of as Reddit.

What do you think of the reporters on the ground tweeting what they see?

That I think is okay. Especially a reporter who’s tweeting what they’re seeing. Again, it gets back to the fact that everyone’s out there with a camera now and everybody wants to be a reporter.

They’re not journalists. But they are reporters.

So if you can figure out how to filter that and occasionally verify stuff—I actually sometimes call the Boston Police now. For me, it’s a way to cover a big city that I could not possibly do all by myself.

How important do you think people’s tweets are in terms of the public getting news?

I love this stuff, I do. Especially for moment-to-moment coverage. Like if I get on the Orange Line, and something happens on the Red Line, I can cover it right that second.

At the same time, you still need somebody who’s asking the “why” questions, like, “WHY did the Red Line Stop?” … “WHY did the building collapse?”

There’s immediate news. And then there’s the other part of it, which is explaining what went on. And that’s where you need people like the The New York Times and certain reporters at The Globe. (Laughs) Even the Herald does some good stuff.

Do you use Twitter lists at all?

Oh yeah! Yes. I do. I have a bunch of searches basically, like #MBTA. And neighborhoods that are easy to follow. When there is a hashtag that comes up like the Marathon, I’ll use that. Snowstorms, that sort of thing.

The other thing I use is a thing on Tweetdeck called “Collections.” It’s sort of Twitter’s equivalent to Storify. People ask me a lot of questions, and I found I was getting the same questions over and over again. So I thought, why not just save all of these questions and answers on the website, so the next time someone asks me that, I can just send them the link.

Or rainbow pictures! (Laughs) I’ve got several [collections] for rainbow pictures on different days. So I’ll tweet out one rainbow picture or two, and then say, “Go to this URL for the rest.”

Last week, there was some rain during the day, and then around 6 o’clock there was this gigantic cloud over the harbor. I happened to be in Brighton at the time, and I tweeted a picture of it, and then everybody starts sending me these photos! So I had pictures from Somerville and one guy down in Quincy, he took this whole panorama shot—and there was just this whole stream of these things and it was incredible to look at. And that’s a perfect example of crowdsourcing.

Right. Seeing the world from all different perspectives, while sitting in one spot…

Right—which you wouldn’t have been able to see years ago. Yesterday I went down to the bench for Robin Williams, and EVERYBODY was taking photos. Someone would write something in chalk and someone else would take a photo of what they’d just written. And that’s amazing. I mean, people always had cameras. But now that it’s in your pocket, you have your camera with you all the time.

People are using it in different ways all the time. Like capturing police brutality in real time. But one thing I noticed was that Youtube cracked down on the videos, at least during Occupy Boston.

Well the guy who’s tweeting from Ferguson, he’s putting all of his stuff on Vine—he’s not even touching YouTube. Because Vine is just like Twitter, it’s unfiltered and you can get it up right away.

So what’s your day job?

This is it. (Laughs) The website.

In fact, my entire news unit is right here. I just put my laptop out in the morning and look on Twitter.

I can show you, I have it right here. It’s just an old Acer laptop (Laughs). And TweetDeck. I use Gimp for photo processing. I finally broke in and bought an actual police scanner.

After I look on Twitter, I go to this guy Stanley Staco (@stacos) to see if I’ve missed any important crimes. Boston EMS Incidents (@BEMSincidents) is also good because they’re EMTs and if someone gets shot they have to be there. I see what The Globe has done. Then look around the blog sites that I follow.

Was there ever a moment when you were like “wow this is so awesome what I do”?

Yeah I can tell you two moments. One was, I was just looking at Twitter. And somebody on the Red Line was like “I’m on a train, in a tunnel—the lights just went out and the train’s dead.” Then I saw a similar one from someone on the Orange Line, and then the Green Line, and then the Blue Line … one after another. It was like alright, something’s going on here.

And sure enough, they were doing work on the power system. It turns out there are two cables that feed the entire T system. And they had taken one out for repairs. And then a worker got confused and pulled the other cord—it was like that scene in Airplane when Johnny pulls the plug and all the landing strip lights go out. So I emailed the guy at the T and got the story.

I was the first person to have that story. All because I saw those four tweets and was able to figure out, hey, there’s something going on here. That was cool.

The other one was a couple years ago, when we lost all of our water: Aquapocalypse (I made money on t-shirts! (Laughs)) We have two aqueducts that feed Boston, and they had taken the one down for repairs. The pipe that connected the other one to the rest of Boston blew out.

All of a sudden, we had lost water. And the first I heard of that was on Twitter.

Then, all of a sudden, people kept asking me, “Where do I get bottled water?” … “Are soda fountains safe?” It was like people were using me as a sort of conduit for discussion. And it was great being this source where people could come for information. If I didn’t know the answers to their questions, chances are somebody else would know and chime in. It was like a news community in Boston.

You see a lot of the top Twitter folks in Boston posting, not just curated content but sponsored content, and getting paid for it—whereas you are more reporting and tweeting. Do you think there’s another line of content that we haven’t seen yet? What do you think is next for the city?

If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be sitting here! (Laughs) That’s a very good question. I would love to see more neighborhood tweeting. It’s frustrating sometimes hearing about something that’s happening in a particular neighborhood and not knowing the answer, whereas there are probably people on the ground who do know the answer. And Twitter is the perfect medium for that. I can see something where it’s not based on Twitter. Twitter is not very good when you actually want to have a discussion. It’s good for “Oh my god something just blew up” kind of stuff. But once you get down beyond two or three messages in a message chain, it kind of falls apart. Facebook potentially is there, but you know, it’s Facebook.

Yeah I feel like it’s if it’s not going to make them money, they’ll figure out a way to disable it.

It’s interesting because there’s no real search mechanism on Facebook. There’s no real archive. So if you knew there was a discussion a couple months ago, how would you find it? You can’t.

Do you ever use Snapbird for finding old tweets?

I have this search tool I use that searches Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

One of the things I try to do is find the names of murder victims before they’re released to the police.

roxbury murder hub

In fact, when I get home I have to do this—someone got murdered on Devon Street in Dorchester. You start off by searching “RIP Dorchester.”  And 90 percent of what you find won’t have to do with him. But maybe you’ll find one tweet. And then you follow that and you find his first name. And then you do “RIP … whatever his name is.” A lot of times I’m able to find out who this person was and get his pictures. Sometimes I’ll post, “Someone was killed on ____ street,” and people will comment on the post on my site and say “RIP Mark” or whatever his name is.

I don’t do it for a lot of them … but sometimes I want to put a name and a face to this anonymous “person shot in Dorchester” type of thing.

Wow.

It seems we have a lot of people jumping off the Tobin now. And one of the interesting things is, I don’t know if more people are jumping off the Tobin, or if we just know about it more. It’s the same thing with trucks getting Storrowed. I don’t know if more people are doing that, or if more people have a camera now to send it to me.

So I guess there’s just one more thing I was thinking: does it ever feel like it’s just too much?

Well there are two parts of too much. One is just the work itself. You can ask my wife or my daughter about that (Laughs) and they will tell you.

Yeah it’s weird. Sometimes it seems like nothing will happen for a couple weeks, and then all of a sudden we’ll have one weekend where everybody’s getting shot. Just this weekend JP was getting hit with everything: there were stabbings and car crashes….

And another thing that’s sad is that the police don’t even tell you everything. If the police told you everything that was going on, it would be REALLY depressing. Just today, a woman emailed me that this old man on her street got mugged yesterday at knifepoint. And the police haven’t said anything about it! She lives in an unsafe neighborhood without a surveillance camera. And she doesn’t think the police are going to do anything, so she sent me the photo of the two guys running away.

So sometimes after you’ve done your third horrible crime post and you look at your site and realize there’s 20 posts and 18 of them are about people getting stabbed and shot, jumping off bridges and—yes it does.

And you try to remind yourself that for all that, Boston’s a safe city.

And that’s when you take your ear buds out. And you go get some ice cream.

READ THE FULL, UNCUT INTERVIEW WITH @UNIVERSALHUB HERE. WE’D SUGGEST SCROLLING THROUGH HIS TWITTER FEED FOR A WHILE TO SEE WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON IN BOSTON FROM ALL SIDES.

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