Checking a claim that spreads fast
Two clips, one bridge. Which one is current?
A clip says the bridge is closed, another says traffic is moving. Here is how a small newsroom sorted it out with dated evidence.
Humiq / Worked example · Newsrooms · community editors
A fictional scenario that shows how the workspace is meant to be used. People, places and figures are made up.
The question
A regional editor sees two clips of the same river crossing in one morning. One shows barriers, the other shows lorries rolling across. Both are shared thousands of times. Readers ask which one is true today.
The editor opens a research question in the workspace: is the crossing open to freight this week? The scope says public notices, operator statements and footage with a known date. The limits say: no faces, no plate numbers, no names of drivers.
Collecting what can be checked
The desk adds the road authority's notice as a link, the operator's statement as a note, and a photo a colleague took at the crossing with permission from the site manager. Each item gets its source type and the date of the source itself, not the date it was found.
The photo is fingerprinted in the browser. Its file never leaves the laptop. The fingerprint is what later lets anyone confirm that the photo in the published piece is the same one that was reviewed.
Letting the assistant sort, not decide
The assistant groups the material by shared terms. It quotes a line from the notice about a weight limit and a line from the statement that names a different limit. It flags that the figures differ between items. It does not pick a winner.
The editor keeps both quotes as findings, adds a third one written by hand, and links each to the items it rests on.
A second pair of eyes
A colleague who was not involved receives the exported brief and its on-chain id. She opens every source, checks the dates, ticks the checklist and records her verdict from her own wallet: needs work, because the notice is a week older than the statement.
The editor updates the brief, exports it again and anchors the new version. The published piece links to the brief, and readers can see both the reasoning and the record of who reviewed it.