This Storyful Spotlight is brought to you by Senior Journalist Laerke Christensen. To subscribe and receive a monthly roundup straight to your inbox, click here.
Language skills are an essential part of Storyful’s ability to provide trusted, comprehensive, and diverse coverage of news events around the world.
Our journalists speak languages including Arabic, Spanish, French, German and many, many more. Using these skills and cultural insights, we are able to provide accurate translations and employ local knowledge to offer more diverse coverage.
How Native Language Skills Enhance Storyful’s Coverage of Gaza
Native language skills help us provide authentic coverage faster. This has been especially vital for our coverage of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Our multilingual journalists speed up verification by quickly recognising local signage, architecture, and accents.
We are able to translate what speakers are saying and use this to add context to our reporting.
Our knowledge of Arabic has also been vital in our ability to approach and build relationships with uploaders on the ground.
Giant Smoke Cloud Rises Near Khan Yunis After Deadly Israeli Strike
Trust and Timing
Our journalists’ language skills help us build authentic, trusted relationships with uploaders.
Our Spanish speakers not only bring first-hand knowledge from Spain and Latin America, but also allow us to communicate with uploaders in their native languages and dialects.
Such deep regional knowledge also helps us to spot stories much earlier, working to clear and license videos before others are even aware a news event has taken place.
This has helped us expand our licensing work, with our Spanish language skills playing a vital part in recent acquisitions.
Dad Fulfills Daughter’s Childhood Dream With Real-Life Flintstones Car
Navigating Vietnam’s Social Media Landscape
Storyful are specialists in user-generated content. Part of this specialism is our adaptability to working in different patches and languages. During Typhoon Yagi, Storyful journalists cleared footage from Vietnam in Vietnamese, despite not having a native speaker in-house.
Our journalists take the time to understand the local social media landscape. In this case, our journalists discovered that Facebook is the most popular social media platform in Vietnam, and were able to concentrate our discovery and outreach efforts there.
Tropical Storm Yagi Triggers Severe Flooding in Northern Vietnam
To learn more about how Storyful verifies stories around the world, contact publishers@storyful.com today.
