Lessons from Reported.ly

For 20 months, Reported.ly adopted a grassroots approach to telling stories by sourcing from social media to get perspectives from people around the world. But on Aug. 31, Reported.ly was shuttered after its parent company, First Look Media, pulled its funding. We spoke with Reported.ly founder and editor Andy Carvin about what the team learned along the way.
Reporting by Rachel Wise and Katie Grunik

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• Reported.ly primarily delivered news by posting on social media — Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They even experimented with posting to Reddit.
• The team also published stories and daily digests to their website and Medium page.
• Andy Carvin broke the news that Reported.ly would suspend its operations Aug. 31 in a note to readers on Aug. 8.
• One of Reported.ly’s final posts summarizes a few of the biggest global stories “most important” to the team. It includes a list of “fellow journalists, NGOs and citizens around the world” and their Twitter handles so that readers can continue to follow the developing stories.
• According to Fortune, “a First Look Media spokesman said in a statement that while Reported.ly was critically acclaimed, the company has ‘refined our long-term business strategy and are focusing our journalism investments in other endeavors.’ Also, the management ‘wish Andy and the team the best, and would love to see them find a new home for their excellent work.’ ”
• At the Online News Association conference in Denver in September, the entire Reported.ly team came together to deliver a Q&A keynote session. The team discussed “how to create a nimble and responsive social team to address breaking news, how to support distributed teams, how to fund social news operations and more.” The full video of the session is available here.

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