Exploring Media in Transformation | Transforming in Media Exploration
/ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃən/ n. 1: a process of change from one form to another.
Wired reports on how Current TV let just-plain-folks who use Twitter post comments live during the debates.
Current incorporated audiences' 140-character commentaries from the microblogging service Twitter into their broadcasts.
(Thanks Jim Moroney)
AJR has a terrific write-up about Twitter. Besides giving my organization some props for using the platform successfully, it also points out the new ways other news organizations are using it. Let me emphasize "new" as in "more innovative than The Dallas Morning News."
Here's a challenge: This is so easy to do, and costs essentially nothing, so let's get ahead of the curve!
Victor Godinez has a bill of particulars on bad decisions at the Rocky regarding Twitter.
First, in its coverage of the Democratic presidential convention, a reporter accidentally used a profanity in a tweet, and other reporters were told to quickly throw up their own entries to push the post with the offending word off the main page.
Then, not content with that blunder, the paper dispatched a reporter to the funeral of a three-year-old boy killed in a traffic accident caused by an illegal immigrant.
Poynter's Steve Outing explains how breaking news is moving from blogs to feeds -- often using a provider known as Twitter, here: The Twitter Disaster.
The BBC and CNN have been using Twitter for a while, and at The Dallas Morning News, we have registered a Twitter name (Dallasnewscom) but we haven't yet put it into practice. We will experiment with this in 2008.
Of thePBS Idea Lab post Twitter has become the place to get breaking news first, Romanesko says:
That's Chris O'Brien's observation. The first quake-related tweet on Tuesday came nine minutes before the AP pushed out its first story. Gawker's Sheila McClear isn't a Twitter fan, though; she calls it "perhaps the most idiotic form of communication of our time."
J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism just sent out a notice about a niftylearning module they've created called, "Twitter tips." Why shouold you care?
Over the last several months Twitter has finally hit its stride as a leading tool for finding and sharing timely information from all sorts of places and sources. Its usefulness for breaking news is obvious. However, Twitter is equally useful for tracking ongoing stories and issues, getting fast answers or feedback, finding sources, building community, collaborating on coverage, and discovering emerging issues or trends.
From Beatblogging.org:
The Listening Post, Wired's multi-author music blog, joined Twitter a few days ago and promises to use Twitter to deliver micro-posts of information to music fans.
Jeff Jarvis discusses my favorite obsession in Twitter as the canary in the news coalmine
Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake” and “evacuation”. They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news and second a way to find witness media – photos, videos, and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over – though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts....
On U.K's The Online Journalism Blog, by prof Paul Bradshaw details how Twitter has helped get the word out about the quake.
Here is crowdsourcing without the editorial management. How quickly otherwise would a journalist have thought of using Twitterlocal with a Google translation? And how soon before someone improves it so it only pulls tweets with the word ‘earthquake’, or more specific to the region affected? (It also emphasises the need for newspapers and broadcasters to have programmers on the team who could do this quickly)
(I don't even know what Twitterlocal is yet!)
Jennifer Woodard Maderazo has a good roundup of how Twitter has made her a better reporter, (but she also notes that it is a time suck to.) Here are some of her examples of how it's worked for news:
Twitter users in Southern California during the wildfires used the tool to do local reporting for the benefit of neighbors. Even for people who were evacuated and didn’t have a computer, they could follow the updates on their cell phones. Twitter users were also able to broadcast live updates on the Minnesota bridge collapse just minutes after it happened and before many news outlets could get the details out to the public.
The Iowa Caucuses were also covered by citizen journalists via Twitter, filling in the gaps left by local and national coverage. It also proved to be a good way to keep up with the results on Super Tuesday. We’ve also seen mainstream media embrace Twitter and other new media tools for reporting on important, time-sensitive stories.
More recently, Twitter was at least partially responsible for the release of a young journalist jailed in Egypt, who used his cell phone to send a one word cry for help: “Arrested.”
Michael Merschel found this post on Read Write Web on how their journalists are using Twitter:
The scoffers can scoff all they want, but here at RWW our use of Twitter so far has included:
- the discovery of breaking stories,
- performing interviews,
- quality assurance
- and promotion of our work.
My third post today on why journalists should use Twitter. Click this link.
It's becoming an Anthony Moor rant.
UNDERSTAND TWITTER OR DIE.
;-)
OMG, at The case for using Twitter, here are more testimonials, from actual reporters about why journalists should consider Twitter as a new tool for covering a beat. If you are a reporter and you are reading this click the link, please.
If you work for me (and you know who you are) I suggest you start playing with Twitter now, because we need to be there.
OK so I hope everyone knows what Twitter, the microblogging platform, is now. Jeff Jarvis says he's heard of some interesting ways it could be an early warning tool -- like a police scanner -- for news organizations looking for breaking news:
I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine.
Danny Sanchez strikes again. His blog is really a must read.
"Check out this great list from Carlos Granier-Phelps of media outlets throughout the world that are now using Twitter:" URL: List: News organizations using Twitter.
In this post, Twitter, Jeff Jarvis explains how he's come to respect the microblogging platform as "an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging." I agree. Worth a read.
Check out Pharmalot Starts To Tweet -- one of the other newspaper blogs in our beat blogging experiment (the one we're doing with DISD) is using Twitter to get out the word.
