User:Bleuz00m
Yes, I'm a 'newbie' here, but I offer skills in research, data/info forensics and writing. A few examples of what I can do: . I spotted an error in a second-party news service report [Greenwire] published in the New York Times. I called the then-New York Governor Patterson's chief legislative aide to confirm the error, then I called the reporter, his editor and a New York Times editor I know to explain the error. I cited the Governor's aide as the source. The report was corrected and republished by both the second-party newsfeed service and the New York Times.
. When one Pennsylvania newspaper posted a photograph tagged as a Hurricane-Irene-flooded hydraulic fracturing gas drilling site in PA, I knew instinctively that it was an oil drilling site whose equipment and terrain did not and could not exist in Pennsylvania. A few local TV stations re-ran that picture and I had to intercede. In less than an hour, I found the original picture and confirmed it through contacts at Al Jazeera and at TheOilDrum: it was of a flooded oil well site in Pakistan from a week earlier. I contacted the newspaper and TV stations with my findings and they retracted the picture.
. In May 2010, the stock market was suddenly halted due to series of then-unexplained trading spikes. I tweeted some business journalists I know that I 'smelled' that more than one trader had intentionally manipulated a high-frequency-trading software anomaly, to their advantage. A few months later, an SEC investigation confirmed my hunch.
Looking forward to other editors' feedback and insights.