Andy Carvin’s official title is Senior Strategist, Social Media Desk at NPR, but that bureaucratic fog undercuts the scale of his work. More emphatically, The Columbia Journalism Review has called him a "living, breathing real-time verification system," while The Washington Post declared him “a one-man Twitter news bureau.” The Guardian described him as "the man who tweets revolutions," while The Daily Dot labeled him “Edward R. Murrow 2.0,” referencing the World War II-era radio broadcaster often cited as one of journalism’s most inspiring figures. Whatever @acarvin’s doing, it has many observers reaching for superlatives.

Fundamentally what he’s doing is quite simple: he tweets, and he retweets. A lot. Sometimes he goes 20 hours at a stretch, collating from those he follows and passing information on to his eighty thousand followers. He often interjects questions or critiques, building on what he’s read and recruiting fact-checkers. The result can be simultaneously cacophonous, intimate, and illuminating.