The post Citizen sleuthing: The unmasking of Lonelygirl15 appeared first on JD Lasica.
]]>Matt Foremski, pictured below, tells how he did some citizen sleuthing to discover the true identity of YouTube’s Lonelygirl15. She was not a home-schooled 16-year-old girl named Bree but rather an actress named Jessica Rose, who had recently moved from New Zealand to Burbank, Calif. I caught up with Foremski in an AIM chat to learn the details of how he broke one of the biggest Internet stories of 2006.
Q: First off, what’s your age and what do you do?A: I’m 19 now and do some busy work for my dad’s sites, like Silicon Valley Watcher. I was 18 and was taking off a semester of college to play around on the Internet when all this happened. Now i’m at the santa rosa junior college.
Q: Your father, Tom Foremski, got you interested in blogging and then videoblogging?
A: Yes, he always likes to talk to me about emerging tech stuff, which i like as well. I got into vlogging from spending time at YouTube.
Q: When did you first begin following the saga of lonelygirl15 on youtube? what intrigued you about her?
A: I caught it at the end of june – i thought she was pretty and spunky. I feel she turned me on to a new area of youtube, that of videoblogging. before, I just went on youtube to watch the funny cats.
Q: Were you caught up in the storyline, or did you suspect she was spinning fiction from the start?
A: I think it took me a few weeks to catch on, as i read some of the comments attached to her videos. it was happenstance that made me dig around: i had a domain, lg15.com, and I kept getting emails asking if she was a fake or what the actor’s name was.
Q: What did you find out? How did you uncover her identity?
A: I had read through an article about the outing of the lonelygirl15 production on the hollywood site tmz.com and found in the article’s comments a link to a myspace page someone believed to be that of the lg15 actress. whoever it was had closed up shop – made their profile private – which made it seem like a dead end. i had remembered a little trick about google’s search engine cache, as people have used it for evidence gathering before, so I took a look at the page with that tool.
The cache was from late spring, and it had all the person’s salient details – full name, date of birth, home town and such. I then did another google search around that person’s name and came up with two headshots that were undoubtedly of lonelygirl – once again saved in google’s cache, which i rushed over to my dad, and we ended up publishing that on svw early that morning.
Q: You mean Silicon Valley Watcher’s scoop, The identity of LonelyGirl15.
A: Right. initially, just the first two—I added in the latter ones to round it out later that morning.
Q: You also did some digging around about her background in new zealand?
A: Yes, all those details of her background I found on her myspace page. She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who moved to Burbank to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” when i searched her myspace user name, “jeessss426,” on Yahoo, it turned up a bunch of pictures from her probably forgotten ImageShack account.
Then, someone else found a whole load of her online photos, which really gave the story some pop. :~)
Q: OK, what happened next?
A: That morning my friend Cody and I put together a video to feature on youtube.
When my dad published the story it got picked up rather quickly and was sourced for a ny times article and a few others that ran later that morning.
Q: They found out the identity of the filmmakers behind the project, right?
A: Yes, I believe they were sitting on a big article that they then decided to publish after our part of the story broke
Q: This sounds like an effort where users acting as citizen journalists in effect teamed with mainstream reporters to contributed to a piece of investigative reporting. What does this episode say about the power of “online wiki-style investigations and manhunts,” as the NY Times put it?
Q: I think there is a lot to be said to that effect. I think the collaborative construct allows for a lot of people to put in little tidbits of info and half thoughts that when combined properly can be the fabric of great stories. :~)
It’s really comes down to how you can put all those varying sources of information together and pull a story out of it.
A: OK, thanks, Matt, great job.
Q: Sure, thanks!
This post originally appeared as part of the Knight Citizen News Network’s Principles of Citizen Journalism project.
The post Citizen sleuthing: The unmasking of Lonelygirl15 appeared first on JD Lasica.
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