I used four factors as indicators of credibility: disclosure of location, preferably via geocoding (Taylor Dobbs had activated the geocoding feature on his iPhone Twitter app that night, but Seth had not), multiple source verification (the tweets cited information from primary as well as other sources), original pictures or video, and accuracy over time. It also discovers Twitter users with the most mentions.ĭuring the manhunt, I used Keepr to identify reliable sources who appeared to be tweeting from the scene. Keepr’s algorithm extracts credible real-time information from raw Twitter feeds by pulling the 100 most recent tweets from Twitter’s API and counting the words and phrases that occur most frequently. I used Keepr, a social media monitoring software tool I am developing as a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation, to capture Seth’s tweets from Watertown. Can smell smoke in Watertown near Arsenal Mall. Reports of massive explosions and grenades. The next morning we learned that hundreds of rounds of ammunition had been fired and homemade bombs had been deployed. You could smell gunpowder and see smoke in the residential neighborhood near the Watertown and Arsenal Malls. We got to Watertown a little before 1 a.m., moments after the shootout between police and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers suspected of carrying out the Marathon bombings, had ended. The police at the gas station took off toward Watertown, and we followed. Seconds later, we heard, “Shots fired on officers in Watertown” over the scanner, and it was total chaos again. Area cordoned off unknown if injuries.saw a tweet that said the stolen car, a black Mercedes SUV, had been tracked to Watertown. Gunshots at MIT building 32 (Stata Center). We ended up at a gas station in Cambridge on nearby Memorial Drive, which we learned was where the carjacking victim might have escaped. There was talk on the scanner of a carjacking and of a possible suspect on the run. A pack of Massachusetts State Police cruisers started booking it down the street, and the three of us-Brian, Taylor and I-got in my car to follow them. ![]() I still had the police scanner going on my iPhone when things suddenly went from being relatively quiet to a state of total chaos. ![]() He was there with another Northeastern student, Brian D’Amico, a photographer.Īround 12:15 a.m., word came that Sean Collier, the MIT officer who had been shot, had died. We hadn’t met before, but I sent Taylor a message so we could connect in person. Before I left home, I had noticed that Taylor Dobbs, a journalism student at Northeastern and the son of a friend of mine, was tweeting from the scene. ![]() That’s why I drove to Kendall Square in Cambridge, where MIT is located and the shooting had occurred.īy the time I arrived, there were roughly 20 journalists gathered around a police perimeter. I realized this was a situation in which my training as a reporter might allow me to add value to the coverage. I’ve been at MIT for almost two years, but I still think of myself primarily as a journalist. It was the type of response that suggested there was either a significant ongoing threat or this incident was, in fact, related to the bombings-or both. The level of response was out of proportion to a simple shooting, even one on a college campus. The number of units being called in and the urgency in the dispatchers’ voices made it clear this was a big deal. I also followed developments on Twitter, but I didn’t turn on my TV or check news organization websites. As soon as I got the shooting alert from MIT, I turned on a Boston scanner and began monitoring the situation. In the late 1990s, I had been a police reporter for The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, and one of my primary responsibilities was to listen to local police scanners to make sure the paper didn’t miss anything. Please stay clear of the area until further notice.” The FBI had released photos of the bombing suspects that afternoon, so I thought there might be a connection. This latest message didn’t say much more than, “Gunshots were reported. The Boston Marathon bombings had occurred just three days earlier, and it had been less than two months since the entire campus was locked down after a false report of a shooter was called in to the police. I co-direct MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and the Institute’s students and faculty were already on edge. Matt Rourke/Associated I was at home on the night of Thursday April 18th when I received a text alert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about a shooting on campus. ![]() Deval Patrick urges calm during the hunt for the Boston bombings suspect
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