Journalists wanting to integrate Twitter into their newsgathering routine may be nervous about trusting random posts which claim to be relaying important information. Working with known contacts is one thing, but working with total strangers and trying to find out who to trust presents the journalist with a problem.

Craig Kanalley, who runs Breaking Tweets, shares some tips about how he tries to assess who to follow and what's worth following up.

How to verify a tweet Twitter is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 10,000, you can break news. That’s because all tweets are recorded and indexed at search.twitter.com. If someone types the right keyword(s), they can find your tweet.

Breaking Tweets prides itself on giving many different types of Twitterers credit for breaking news, whether it be someone in Honduras with a dozen followers recording the first “earthquake” tweet or a news organization providing the first details of a major story.

But how do you know a tweet’s legitimate? Here’s some methods I use at Breaking Tweets that you can try too:

Timestamp Anytime something breaks with hundreds of tweets in minutes, like a natural disaster, it’s good to type various keywords and keep paging back until you find the first few tweets about the news. Unless these Tweeters are psychic, they’re probably among the first to have knowledge something’s up and they may have additional context depending on the story.

Contextual tweets Immediately check the Twitter user’s page for related tweets around the tweet you found. You’d be surprised how often someone posts a follow-up tweet later or precedes the ‘breaking tweet’ with other pertinent info. This could provide additional context for the story, but it can also help verify a person, especially if they’re posting pictures or other content from the scene.

Authority Check the Twitter user’s bio. Is this a journalist? Is it a random person off the street? Is it a prankster? How about a comedian? Check their web site or blog if they have one listed. See what you can learn about them here. It’s important to have some idea who the tweeter is as you assess the validity of any tweet.

How many past tweets Be leery of new Twitter users. If it’s one of their first tweets, it could be anybody starting an account and claiming to have info on a breaking story. The newer the account is, the more skeptical you have to be.

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