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It should come as no surprise that Andy Carvin, who live tweeted the Arab Spring revolution, would be the one to pioneer a social medium platform focused on real time reporting and live fact checking.

The social media news wire reported.ly launched last January. It mostly published on Facebook and Twitter, although it also posted to a lesser extent on Instagram and Reddit.

Reported.ly published international stories like the Charlie Hebdo shooting less than two days after it occurred.

But in August, reported.ly’s financial backer First Look Media announced that they were pulling the plug and would no longer fund the news wire. Carvin said he is looking at a way to keep the project going.

He shared some takeaways from the experience during a ONA conference in Denver, saying it was best for them to publish on Twitter, because of its fast news sharing capabilities – whereas Facebook with its algorithm was much slower. He also said reported.ly’s journalists valued empathy when covering tragedies and interacting with their sources. To read the entire story originally reported on the blog journalism.co.uk, click here. 

Carvin is a former NPR senior producer. He documented his work live tweeting the Arab Spring in his book Distant Witness, published by CUNY Journalism’s Publishing Press; for more info on the book and to order it, click here.