News breaks.
Images are uploaded to photo-sharing services like TwitPic and yFrog. Links are tweeted by the original photographer. Other people retweet those links or copy and paste them into Facebook or other blogs. In a matter of minutes, an individual photo can spider out in myriad directions.
So how does a news organisation verify images? Director of photography Santiago Lyon explains the Associated Press’ explains the agency’s process and establishes some useful guidelines for other news orgs – above all: “If we can’t verify the content, we don’t use it.”