Remnants of houses lined the streets in piles. The basic foundations were the only part of the structures that still stood. White tarps replaced the destroyed roofs. Mutilated coconut trees, resembling jagged sticks, stood in clusters. On a rainy morning in early January 2014, Darcy Knoll drove along dirt roads to a small Filipino village inland from the coast called San Miguelay. The communications specialist for CARE, a humanitarian organization, was with a reporter writing about the building of shelters for people with nowhere to live. Two months had passed since Typhoon Haiyan devastated the country, and rebuilding efforts were proceeding.

Journalists came from around the world to report on the broken lives and the wreckage. Media requests had poured into CARE’s Philippines office for a few weeks and staff were doing what they could to help reporters get closer to stories. Fewer than 500 people lived in San Miguelay, which had been torn apart by winds over 235 km/h. Knoll and the reporter walked through the muddy streets, ducking under temporary structures to speak with families who had lost everything. “It’s really important that we work with journalists,” says Knoll. “We want to put them in touch with people to give information on what’s happening. And to tell stories.”

Storytelling in an international context is something that’s become much more difficult in recent years. While reporters once regularly travelled overseas and had time to develop articles with complex narratives, parachuting in to cover a disaster is all most news organizations can manage now. As with many international stories, the relationships that human rights organizations, aid agencies and think tanks have built on the ground provide welcome shortcuts for journalists, who have had little choice but to rely more on the work of others.

While foreign reporting resources have diminished over the past two decades, these organizations have only grown. They can’t take the place of shuttered foreign bureaus, but their research and connections are filling part of the void and helping to keep international storytelling alive. But there’s always a risk to relying too heavily on groups that have their own agendas.

Since Canada’s first newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, foreign reporting has been part of the mix—although in the 1700s, international coverage was predominantly from Britain. North American newspapers started opening overseas bureaus in the early 20th century. Public appetite for international reporting tends to fluctuate depending on what’s happening around the world, according to Ryerson journalism professor Gene Allen, who says its heyday lasted from the 1950s into the ’80s. The Vietnam War and the Cold War led papers to expand foreign reporting to maintain prestige and compete with television networks that were growing in popularity. Back then, journalism made enough money for news organizations to invest in foreign reporting.

Brian Stewart was a foreign correspondent with CBC and NBC during the ’80s. “There were no limits to resources,” he says, referring especially to his time with NBC. “You wanted a plane? Rent a 747. Then, one day, they came along and started cutting. It was horrific.”

When Stewart covered the Gulf War in 1991, CBC had almost 40 people in the Middle East to report on the crisis (now, you could count them on one hand). He would spend weeks, sometimes months, reporting in one place. Today, that’s almost unheard of.

The culprits in this decline are by now well familiar: the rise of the internet, economic recession, media consolidation and shrinking ad revenues. A growing emphasis on local coverage has further undermined foreign reporting. And given that the cost of maintaining a full foreign bureau averages around $150,000 per year for a newspaper and over $1 million for a major television network, it’s not surprising that international desks have been the first to go.

The number of Canadian foreign correspondents decreased by close to 40 percent during the ’90s alone, according to the 2001 report “International News in the North American Media,” by former journalist and communications strategist Dan Halton. The downward trend hasn’t stopped, and the reduction has been most obvious at Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star. In November 2005, it had bureaus in Delhi, Hong Kong, Israel, London, Mexico and Washington. Today, only Washington remains. The Globe and Mail has closed some bureaus and opened others, but its overall numbers are also down. CBC has been slashing positions and scaling back for the past decade. Rather than maintain a large number of permanent foreign bureaus, it now prefers smaller, temporary ones—the newest pocket bureau, in Moscow, opened in January.

Wire services have helped newspapers fill gaps, but even these have fewer resources than they once did. Josef Federman, Associated Press bureau chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories, says AP has fewer than half the number of reporters in the area than it did when he started in the early 2000s. “Many days, you feel like you’re hanging off the side of a building by your fingernails,” he says. “You’re just holding on for dear life and hoping you get everything covered.”

The shift away from original foreign reporting means there’s less opportunity to understand what’s happening in other parts of the world. When the journalists who do travel have only a few days to get a story, context is often sacrificed, according to Tony Burman, who reported from 30 countries during his three decades as a CBC producer. “However informed these reporters are, I don’t think anything replaces living in the environment,” he says. “It’s easy to report on Toronto for Torontonians, on Canada for Canadians, but when you have to make sense of Syria or the Congo for a Canadian audience, that takes a nuance, a diversity and a range of reporting. What suffers is thoughtful, reflective, intelligent coverage.”

Researchers at human rights groups and think tanks don’t face the same constraints as their journalistic counterparts, allowing them to build a deep presence in the places where they operate. They have the time and resources to invest in the big questions journalists aren’t as free to pursue on their own. “The time and effort we put into our stories is almost unheard of in the media,” says Human Rights Watch spokesperson Emma Daly. “We don’t leave things out. We really try to figure out what’s going on. We share a lot of DNA with journalists, but what we do with information is different.”

While the research these groups do isn’t journalism, it can influence reporters. The result is a symbiotic relationship that is strengthening. “The easiest place to get help is through an NGO because we want media attention for visibility,” notes Mark Nonkes, who was the regional communications officer for Asia Pacific at the humanitarian and aid group World Vision until January. “We need journalists, and I think journalists need us as well.”

Amnesty International, a human rights organization started in 1961, employed 14 researchers by the early ’70s. By 2015, that number had grown to 130 full-time researchers. Similarly, Human Rights Watch had a research staff of about 10 for most of the ’80s, but now employs 400 people in 100 countries. With annual operating budgets of $88 million and $73 million respectively, these groups maintain a strong presence in places many reporters left long ago.

After the introduction of a 24/7 TV news cycle by CNN in 1980 increased filing demands, Stewart started relying routinely on outside organizations in the ’90s. With less time to do original research, he and his colleagues went where information had already been collected. He says, “We began to use think tanks as a necessary efficiency.”

Although the work of think tanks and NGOs can overlap, there are differences. The former are research institutes that produce reports to influence policy. The latter include human rights organizations and aid agencies as well as political and religious groups; most operate with advocacy at the forefront of their agendas. Not surprisingly, the larger established groups tend to be more helpful for journalists, since they’ve spent decades building credibility and expanding their reporting resources. In April 2015, when earthquakes in Nepal killed more than 8,000 people, journalists wrote about the crumbled buildings, the bodies buried in rubble and the gaping holes in the pavement. But when the shaking stopped and people tried to piece their lives back together, many reporters moved onto the next country, the next disaster, the next big story. Humanitarian workers stayed behind; they’d been there before the earthquake, too.

These groups do more than just take journalists on disaster tours the way Knoll did in the Philippines. CARE brings reporters to its member offices for a week to offer story access. And Journalists for Human Rights often connects correspondents with local reporters so they can have a better understanding of the issues they’re covering.

Reporters regularly go to World Vision to gain access to remote areas. The staff, which includes many former journalists, often works with reporters on story development. It’s not uncommon for aid groups to connect journalists with sources or translators, while think tanks serve as a more traditional hub for information—and for leads on stories that might go otherwise unreported.

Graeme Smith first landed in Afghanistan in 2005 to cover the country for the Globe. Packed alongside maps of Kandahar and his Canadian passport was a Ziploc bag filled with crisp U.S. bills—$15,000 in cash, renewed by the Globe every couple of months. Within five years, that money began to dry up. Reporting trips became shorter, and so did the articles the paper published. Smith says he started getting demands from his editors for 300-word takes and to produce articles quickly, sometimes without much research.

Smith was the paper’s last bureau chief in Moscow. He opened a bureau in Kandahar, which later closed. The Istanbul bureau saw a similar fate. “I didn’t want to stick around to watch the foreign desk continue losing its ability to cover the world,” he says.

After leaving the Globe in 2012, he soon found himself back on Afghanistan’s familiar dusty streets. This time, he was with a global think tank called the International Crisis Group. He carried the same black leather Moleskine notebook and the same
0.5 uni-ball Micro Point pen he used while at the Globe. He wore the same shalwar kameez, talked to the same people and asked similar questions using the same translator—but now he was an analyst writing research papers on global conflict.

With the ability to spend months—in some cases, years—reporting on an issue, think tanks and NGOs are breaking stories. A 38-page report Smith wrote about the future of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) security force, conducted over a two-year period and published in June 2015, received a lot of attention. Despite the overthrow of the Taliban government more than a decade ago, Afghan people continued to be victims of human rights abuses by government and military officials. The report revealed that the controversial ALP program, intended to help bring stability to the country, exacerbated the conflict in some areas. AP picked up the story, and the report kept surfacing in news clips. Smith says it’s not unusual for analysts to get calls from journalists on a daily basis.

In September 2015, Human Rights Watch published a 39-page report on children who risk their lives to mine gold in the Philippines. Adolescent boys spend over an hour underwater collecting small gold pieces, breathing through a rubber hose. Others crawl down narrow, unstable shaft that reach depths of 25 metres. The Philippines outlawed child labour, but the study, conducted over a year, found the laws were not being enforced. Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 135 people—including 65 child miners—for the report, which Al Jazeera, AP and several Asian and European media outlets covered.

Non-journalistic organizations are now part of the news ecosystem, providing information that can frame a conversation. “If I can inspire a journalist to write a story about militias, even if he or she doesn’t refer directly to my report, then that’s a success,” says Smith, who believes that, in many ways, his new role represents the future of foreign reporting. “The impoverished newsrooms these days have no choice except to rely on NGO research to fill the gaps in their foreign coverage.”

Throughout Martin Regg Cohn’s 11 years as a foreign correspondent for the Star, he occasionally relied on NGOs for his reporting. “They’re usually locally engaged people,” says the political columnist and former foreign editor. “They can see things that an outsider can’t see.”

In 2005, while working on a story about an HIV outbreak in India, Cohn accompanied World Vision staff on rounds through the slums and brothels in Mumbai. That same year, the organization took him to the fishing villages of Tamil Nadu to see the aftermath of the tsunami that destroyed the southeastern shores of India. “NGOs keep getting more and more established by virtue of their reputations,” he says. “They’re more accessible than ever, they’re more online than ever, they’re better staffed than ever. They’re an extra set of eyes and ears, but they have their own agenda.”

These groups do research with the goal of making a difference, and that goal extends to their work with journalists. The access they provide may be invaluable, especially in the context of ever-shrinking foreign reporting budgets, but reporters who rely too heavily on them run the risk of producing overly mediated, cautious or biased stories.

When Star reporter Marco Chown Oved was in Burkina Faso reporting on mining developments tied to foreign aid, he needed access to a mine. It was in the middle of the desert in a dangerous, hard-to-access area, but Plan Canada agreed to fly him into the workers’ compound on its corporate jet.

The compound, just minutes away from the massive open-pit mine, was the size of a small town, and its perimeter was lined by a fence. It had a community garden, a gym, a gasoline-powered mill and a cafeteria. Eggplants and tomatoes grew in the garden. The cafeteria, which reminded Oved of those in Canadian high schools, served chicken and rice with a cup of Jell-O on a plastic tray. “Aid groups often work in rural, hard-to-reach areas, and they have an on-the-ground perspective, but when you go somewhere with an aid group, you’re embedded,” says Oved. “They are controlling your experience to a certain extent.”

That night, Oved flew back to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The following morning, he got into a mid-’90s Mercedes Benz—a popular car in West Africa—and made an eight-hour trek along rough gravel roads back to the mine. This time, he was not escorted by Plan Canada. He was just 100 metres from where he’d been the day before, but on the other side of the fence. Oved says the trip without Plan Canada gave him a different understanding of what was going on in the area, but it would have been harder to pull off if the organization hadn’t flown him in the day before.

NGOs have flagged issues that later became meaningful topics in the news, including deplorable conditions in garment factories and violence in the Congo. “It wasn’t reporters who went in there first,” says Oved. “The flip side is that they don’t play by the same rules as we do. I think that we’re all too quick to just accept what they say…There’s always another side to it.”

Fortunately, distinguishing good information from bad is one of the fundamental skills of a good journalist. The research these organizations do can be vital to covering international affairs—if reporters maintain a critical distance. They are excellent sources—as long as they aren’t the only sources. Since journalists can’t do foreign reporting from a desk in Canada, relying on these groups will be necessary as long as news budgets remain small. “You really do have to hang out in dark corners of the world if you’re going to shed any light on them,” says Smith. “There’s no substitute for being there.”

We live in an era of self-driving cars and light-up hoverboards. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that robots are starting to replace professions that were once viewed as invaluable—financial advisers, surgeons and reporters all have automated equivalents.

This doesn’t mean that all journalists are going to be replaced by typing WALL-E replicas, but it is a technology that warrants caution.

“Robo-journalism” can generate thousands of stories in the time it takes a reporter to file one (over 1,000 articles per second is the standard). The Associated Press has been using a word-generating platform called Wordsmith for analysis-based writing since 2014, and Yahoo also uses the software for recaps and reviews of fantasy sport.

A robot-generated story is born in stages. First, data is inputted into the system. This information is comprehensive and comes in large quantities, but it’s limiting in that there’s no room for analysis beyond a refined scope. An algorithm determines what’s newsworthy by detecting changes in value and minimums and maximums (for example, changes in stock prices for business stories).  

Next, the bots find an angle. This comes from a pre-authored library of story patterns based on events and circumstances. A way to approach a generic sports story, for example, might be “heroic individual performance,” “strong team effort,” or “came out of a slump,” wrote computational journalist Nicholas Diakopoulos in a blog post on the anatomy of a robot journalist.

From there, it’s a game of connect the dots: specific story points in the generic copy are matched to individual pieces of data, like the names of the players and the score. To incorporate personal details and other factual context, additional information is pulled from internet databases.

In 2014, Business Insider published an article called, “If you don’t think robots can replace journalists, check out this article written by a computer.” It followed the release of Quill, an artificial intelligence product created by Narrative Science. Scientist and co-founder Kris Hammond told Business Insider the product could “turn boring data and statistics into highly readable stories with a beginning, middle, and end.”

An expert from sample report about a baseball team called the Manalapan Braves Red, generated by the software, reads:

Cole Benner did all he could to give Hamilton A’s-Forcini a boost, but it wasn’t enough to get past the Manalapan Braves Red, as Hamilton A’s-Forcini lost 10-5 in six innings at Pecci two on Saturday.

Tech Times reported that AP produced around 4,300 stories per quarter in 2015 using Wordsmith — 14 times the amount of content than previous years. In an already fragile job market, that’s cause for concern. What happens when journalists become replaceable?

Martin Ford, a leading commentator on the potential impact job automation will bring to the economy, told TheMediaOnline that there will be no “slaughter of all the journalists.” A BBC infographic based on an Oxford University and Deloitte study about robots taking over jobs ranked automation for journalists and editors as “quite unlikely,” with an 8 percent risk factor.

But even if jobs aren’t being eliminated, the technology could create fewer entry-level positions, according to Ford. “If you want to have a career in journalism and you’re just graduating … your first assignment may be one of those routine formulaic things,” he said. “That’s been the way that journalists have learned the ropes from the beginning.”

Robo-journalism is still in its infancy. But as technology improves, it’s possible that news organizations will eventually start experimenting with automatic newswriting in other areas. Is that what we want? A good journalist can accurately analyze information, but a better journalist asks meaningful questions and thinks critically—things a machine will never be able to replicate.

Last week, CBC journalists Susan Ormiston, Corinne Seminoff and Jean-Francois Bisson made the 12-hour trek to CBC’s new pocket bureau in Moscow, Russia, where they’ll spend the next three months documenting the transformation of Russian society under Vladimir Putin’s leadership.

“Moscow is a place we haven’t been for many years,” says CBC managing editor Greg Reaume. “It’s a region that’s under-reported, given its growing influence and Putin’s willingness to be active in the world well beyond Russia’s borders.” He adds that some of these problems are extremely complex—like Russia becoming more involved in partnerships with Canada and the U.S. to contain ISIS and Putin’s aggressive response to foreign policy. “It’s of interest and importance to Canadian audiences,” he says. “We hope this will be an opportunity to address some of those issues.”

Permanent foreign bureaus once held a prominent place in broadcast journalism; high operating costs have made many disappear from the map. To maintain a presence in faraway lands where news is breaking, organizations are now looking to pop-up bureaus as a solution to fit the ever-changing news agenda.

“I think it’s the next best thing to having a permanent presence in a foreign country,” wrote Seminoff in an email to the RRJ. “But we’ve barely been here a week, and I already feel we will never get it all done. We just won’t have the time to do all the stories I’d like to do.” Still, Seminoff says that pop-up bureaus are a better alternative to no coverage or trying to report from home through agency material and Skype interviews. “We are very grateful that we can still do journalism the way it should be done, through our own eyes and with our own knowledge.”

CBC has less than half the number of full-time overseas bureaus it did 10 years ago (the Moscow bureau used to be a permanent one), but it’s been able to compensate through temporary set-ups in Hong Kong, Cairo, Berlin and Ghana. An emphasis on mobility has become a lot more important for foreign reporting, but pop-up bureaus don’t have the capacity to meet the long-term benefits of a full-time foreign placement.

Part of the problem is money. “We’re finding opportunities to do some really meaningful reporting while not incurring the extremely heavy cost of permanently locating somewhere where the news agenda may well wax and wane,” says Reaume. According to a report by communications strategist and former CBC reporter Dan Halton, “International News in the North American Media,” operating costs can hover around one million dollars for a major television station.

In 2014, BBC launched a mobile bureau in the U.S. as part of an experimental project. The travelling bureau—a red SUV filled with camera equipment and a small team of BBC video journalists—relocated to a different American city each month to produce content for the global news services. One year later, in 2015, BBC Pop Up came to Canada to film a documentary series in Yellowknife.

To keep up with shifting news priorities, CBC is looking for other ways to expand its global footprint, says Reaume. With the summer Olympic Games on the radar, Rio de Janeiro will likely be the next bureau to pop up on the map.

This is an updated version of the story, which includes a quote from Corinne Seminoff. 

The streets of downtown Montreal are cluttered with protestors chanting, “Fuck the police!” Traces of the sun filter out from behind department store buildings as anti-capitalists rally for International Workers’ Day. Spectators capture footage of police spraying a thick cloud of tear gas into the crowd, which sends people running. Marie-Espérance Cerda interviews protestors and documents the unfolding events, but instead of using a standard video camera, she’s using six GoPros on a rig to produce virtual reality (VR) journalism.

Later, electronic headgear that creates a three-dimensional, interactive environment will immerse viewers in the same scene Cerda witnessed. This experience—the feeling of being in a place and the heightened sense of emotion that goes with it—isn’t possible through traditional journalism. Words on a page or a video on a screen creates distance between the reader and the story, an empathy divide that VR shrinks.

While the concept has been around since the Second World War, long before computer scientist Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, its most common commercial application so far has been video games. In the past year, though, journalists have explored VR’s powerful storytelling possibilities, but they must navigate the tricky ethics that invariably come with new technology.

A VR headset creates a 360-degree field of vision that moves with the user, allowing her to explore virtual surroundings and become part of the story. Lenses focus and reshape the display to make a three-dimensional stereoscopic image similar to one in a View-Master toy. Most high-tech headsets take measurements of the user’s skull to record motion, giving the user control. In 2014, Google released Google Cardboard, a build-it-yourself device that makes VR accessible to anyone with a smartphone. A small magnet works with the phone’s magnetometer (which controls the compass) to create movement.

Cerda’s Montreal experiment began as a major research project for her master’s degree in media production at Ryerson University. The 10-minute video starts outside of a downtown Burger King. Straight ahead, people wave Quebec flags and hold picket signs high. Look up and you’ll see the remnants of daylight reflected in a partially blue sky. If you turn around, there’s a white bus parked in the middle of an intersection. Police armed with riot shields file out one by one. Then they start spraying tear gas.

The coolness of VR can overshadow ethical concerns. There’s more control, but the viewer is confined to the passenger seat. “You’re existing in a universe of possibility that’s been defined by the person who’s made the news item,” says Gene Allen, a journalism professor at Ryerson and the supervisor for Cerda’s project. “They’ve decided what to shoot, and they’ve decided how to put it together.” While “inside” the protest video, viewers can pick where to look and whom to listen to—an illusion of choice. But there’s limited perspective on what’s happening outside the frame. There’s a similar selection process in all forms of journalism, notes Allen: reporters include what’s interesting and toss the rest.

In November 2015, The Globe and Mail launched a roughly three-month VR trial. Three employees spend their days inside an incubation lab on the main floor of the paper’s building. A lot of the current focus is on the technological aspect, says Matt Frehner, senior editor of mobile and interactive news, adding that the VR team is still in the “how does this work” phase. The goal is to create an immersive experience that’s as different from regular video as IMAX is from a regular movie. Meanwhile, Canadian Press plans to explore the technology’s potential within the next year.

Still, Canada is a few steps behind American outlets. ABC and The Wall Street Journal have created VR content. And last November, Associated Press announced plans to produce a series of downloadable stories, which will be released by March.

On Sunday November 8, 2015, The New York Times arrived with Google Cardboard, allowing subscribers to watch an 11-minute video called The Displaced. It followed three child refugees, including 9-year-old Chuol. When his village in South Sudan was attacked, he fled to the swamp with his grandmother; his father and grandfather were burned alive, and he was separated from his mother. He stands at the front of a hollowed-out wooden boat, paddling through a narrow stream surrounded by thick blades of grass and lily pads. The sun reflects off the water, which may conceal crocodiles—an ever-present threat in the swamp. “I know that if I am eaten by a crocodile, it may be a slow death,” the boy says in the video, “but it is better than being killed by the fighters.”

Stories told through VR are usually emotional ones, and the danger is some will go too far. Would people want to experience the terrorist attacks in Paris? The earthquakes in Nepal? Empathy is a powerful tool, when used correctly, and VR breaks down familiar barriers that stand in the way of complete understanding. In the Times project, instead of trying to imagine what living conditions are like in South Sudan, VR lets people temporarily experience it for themselves. Feelings are enhanced and perceptions are amplified, but that can push people into dark corners.

After the paper launched the VR project, Michael Oreskes, news chief at National Public Radio and a former Times editor, was among the people who voiced concern. “Our stories can’t be virtually true,” he wrote. “They must be fully real.” While some projects (including Cerda’s video and the Times’s refugee film) are made from real-time footage, others use computer-simulated images based on maps and photographs. But can embellished stories be honest stories? Allen believes they can, so long as reporters clearly indicate what they’re doing. Feature writers reconstruct scenes all the time, he says, and television programs, including CBC’s the fifth estate, often use simulated footage. The difference with VR is that it’s harder to draw the line between what’s real and what’s recreated. It’s up to the journalist and the editor to produce content that serves as a genuine representation of a story.  

Late last September, Cerda presented her VR project at Ryerson to a small group of people huddled around a boardroom table. A woman strapped on the cardboard headset and became immersed in cluttered Montreal streets as people chanted and police filed out of a white bus. She spun around in a black office chair and said, “Incredible.”

It’s 8:51 p.m. in Athens, just minutes before the decision on whether Greece should accept financial help from the rest of Europe will be announced. A cell phone captures footage of the crowds gathered outside the parliament building—some hold signs with the words “no, ox!” printed in bold black letters; others carry brightly-coloured flags that say “nai” (yes).

Nine minutes later, cheers erupt and Greek flags are waved in the air: the majority voted “no.” While many people read about the result of the Greek bailout referendum in the headlines the following day, Snapchat users from all corners of the world were able to experience it as it happened from the people who were there.

In recent years, a lot has been said about citizen journalism. The digital world has seen, and will continue to see, a rise in the number of distribution platforms available—making it easier for everyday people to report on stories in ways that were traditionally only done by journalists. Snapchat, a picture and video messaging app formerly used to exchange questionable selfies, has recently evolved as a storytelling tool and a reporting outlet.

With the introduction of a new “Our Story” feature earlier this year, Snapchat aimed to “build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first.” Footage is submitted by users and stitched together by editors, resembling a kind of live broadcast that isn’t typical of news outlets. Instead of being told through a single voice, these stories represent new perspectives.

The ability to easily document and share what’s going on in the world helps create a better sense of understanding. Drawing upward of 20 million views every day, Snapchat has expanded its platform to include coverage of festivals, sporting events, cultural practices and news. In July, Ramadan prayers in Mecca were live streamed after 100 million Muslims made the annual pilgrimage to the city in Saudi Arabia. TIME magazine wrote that the coverage was applauded because it shed a positive light on the event, changing the “negative global narrative surrounding Islam.”

Following the death of nine people in the South Carolina church shooting last June, Snapchat created a “Charleston Strong” live story. People expressed messages of love, support and grief—one snap showed scenes from outside the church, another showed a mourner carrying a flower for each victim.

Snapchat spokeswoman Shannon Kelly told the Washington Post that what they’re doing is all about community storytelling. In a time when news outlets can’t necessarily afford to have reporters stationed everywhere all the time, it’s never been more important to utilize the capabilities of individuals and their smartphones. Snapchat isn’t just telling stories—they’re connecting people through one of the most powerful storytelling tools: other people.