How We Use Twitter for Journalism?

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick

How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we've been leveraging Twitter heavily for some of our most important news writing. While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we've got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the microblogging medium.

Josh Catone wrote here in January about the rise of Twitter as a platform for serious discourse and discussed the way that a handful of mainstream journalists are using the tool. Charles Cooper did an informal survey earlier this month that found a definite majority of journalists old and new to be absent from Twitter.

I did an interview on the BBC last week with some traditional journalists about Twitter and they scoffed at the idea that it could be useful. "Well," one said after I talked about how we've used it, "I certainly won't be checking it out." Hmph!

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.

Breaking News

One of the defining characteristics of Twitter is its ease of use. While getting engaged enough to find value in the service does require some initial investment of time and energy - on a day to day and minute by minute basis, Twitter is remarkably easy to post to. As a result, people often post things they discover to Twitter before or instead of posting it to a blog.

Whether it's natural disasters, political developments or breaking tech news - it's common to discover items of interest first on Twitter.

Robert Scoble wrote a year ago about how Twitter users reported a major earthquake in Mexico City several minutes before the USGS did. Zolie Erdos chronicled last month how Twitter users beat government agencies and the world's (formerly) leading news organizations in reporting on March earthquakes in both China and Japan.

We discover tech news tips on Twitter first on a regular basis. When Google bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, for example, we learned about it on Twitter. That early news tip lead to our covering the news before any one else and getting our story on the front page of Digg - good in this case for tens of thousands of pageviews.

Interviews

When we got to interview Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW this year, we solicited interview questions via Twitter. If was quickly evident that many people wanted to read his thoughts about data portability, but we got some other good question suggestions as well. That's becoming an increasingly common tactic for us and other writers, as it's so easy to supplement our own questions with those of a larger network.

Below: Richard masters the Twinterview (ha!), requests questions he should ask Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. Interview forthcoming.

We've also found lately though that Twitter itself is very useful for performing public interviews. By putting out single or multiple questions into our Twitter networks in a call-and-response fashion, we've gathered piles of rich research in far less time than it would have taken to try and call people on the phone.

Some Twitter users reply to our questions with single line answers, others with a few tweets in a row and still others send us paragraphs by email when they see we've asked an interesting question.

The questions we asked for our post titled "APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion of the Pros and Cons', for example, recieved answers via Twitter from people like Esther Schindler, senior online editor at CIO.com, Ray Valdes, Research Director of Web Services at Gartner Inc, Chris Saad, co-founder and chairman of the Data Portability Workgroup and Raju Vegesna, of web office suite Zoho. In addition to people of such stature that we'd have to take a deep breath before being so presumptuous as to call them on the phone - our questions get interesting replies from a diverse group of people we would never have thought to ask personally.

We recognize that people using and replying on Twitter may not be generally representative of the population at large, but for qualitative interviews it's a tool that's hard to beat.

When Sarah Perez wrote a post here titled "Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media" she found a wide range of respondents for her questions. Some were hardcore early adopters and others reported that they just dabbled in tools like Twitter.

As Kevin Anderson wrote about Sarah's post at Corante, "No, it's not a random sample. But since when are 'man on the street' interviews?"

Quality Assurance

I'm not ashamed to admit that I do QA via Twitter. We often get feedback on misspellings, missed links and other publishing faux pas very quickly via Twitter. It's an easy way for readers to offer quick feedback.

Twitter can work really well for tech support or for finding quick answers to small tech questions. That makes it great for filling in details you can't quite remember. "What is that technology that does the toast-like popups on Mac desktop?" I asked when writing an article last week. Within minutes several people reminded me it's GROWL. Thanks!

There's a general sentiment of giving on Twitter, but a journalist's opportunity to perhaps provide later coverage can't help but further incentivize people to provide help.

Promotion

Promoting your online articles over Twitter is probably the crassest way a journalist can use the medium. Some people like getting an RSS feed through their Twitter account, but not very many. Here in Portland, Oregon our local daily paper feeds headlines through Twitter and that works real well. When bloggers post links to their posts, or post pleas for votes on Digg, it can feel a little dirty. We try to post either particularly interesting articles or to add a little extra value to each link to our own content we send out. We also try to make sure that the clear majority of our Tweets aren't about our own content.

That said, Twitter is a remarkably good traffic driver to our posts. A healthy little group of people click through our links on Twitter, some more via FriendFeed and they often give us great early feedback.

If we're working on something we think will be of interest, sometimes we'll prime the pump a bit and let people know what's coming up. So far, we've heard almost entirely positive feedback on these practices. That's probably based largely on the relationships we've got with our readers, many of which were developed using Twitter. If you had 20 to 50 people that consistently offered feedback on your articles, wouldn't that be great? That's what it feels like we get on Twitter.

Conclusion

When I first saw Twitter I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. Now, despite the length of this post, I find 140 characters plenty of space to communicate about almost anything. You can scoff all you want, we're using the hell out of this tool here at RWW and it's treating us very well. Others are starting to do similar things and it will likely be downright common very soon.

You can add RWW Editor Richard MacManus, Josh Catone, Sarah Perez and myself as friends on Twitter to join in the reporting fun! Thanks to Scott Macdonald for the reporter birdy pic.

Do We Need Editor in the Digital Age?

August 21, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota

Do we need them any more in the digital age? Of course, no! Everybody hates editors and would feel a relief if they all go to hell.

Reporters hate - because editors sit the whole days at the office and do nothing but ask stupid questions to hard-working people on the beat.

Readers hate editors - because everybody can be a journalist now, but it is still harder to be an editor with a top-down authority!

Advertising sales-reps hate - as those bastards in the newsroom oppose all good deals the newspaper could make.

Promotions people hate - as editors never share their enthusiasm to the new give-away, or a contest, or a PR event and grumble about journalism and values.

Research people hate editors - as their drawers are full of readership surveys that have never been used.

Designers hate - as editors seem to have no artistic taste and prefer to publish just words, words, words…

Internet geeks hate print editors - as they don’t embrace the internet revolution as quickly and as much as they should: they underestimate bloggers, neglect user-generated-content and play Canute, trying to turn back the waves by opposing the web-first policy in publishing stories.

And last but not least publishers hate editors - as they oppose any cost cutting at newsrooms, are reluctant to any innovation in the paper (they call it ”gate-keeping”) and - of course - know nothing about their readers’ needs!

Is there anybody who loves those devils? Do we really need them?

A hypothetical newsroom by Jeff Jarvis

”Are not they a luxury that we could do without in the digital age?,” asks Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and internet evangelist, in his column at the UK Guardian?

”I took a hypothetical newsroom staff of 100 as a round number, then cut by 30% - not draconian by today’s precedents - and asked what the priorities should be when the cutbacks come. In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

When these reporters blog their beats - involving the community in suggesting and requesting stories, sometimes even in reporting, and certainly in correcting mistakes - then the community acts as the assignment desk, and the idea of editing every comma seems futile. My blog readers are my editors.”

Editor as a ”digital curator”?

However, Mr. Jarvis still sees the role for editors:

”There is a need to add context and fill holes in understanding - by using links. As we move from an economy of scarcity in media to one of abundance, there is a need to curate: to find the best and brightest from an infinite supply of witnesses, commentators, photographers and experts. As news becomes collaborative, editors will need to assemble networks from among staff and the public; that makes them community organisers. I also believe editors should play educator, helping to improve the work of the network.”

This thesis is not new. For example Valeria Maltoni, a blogger and a marketeer, has seen editors as ”digital curators” that offer ”intelligent guidance and selection” on the news websites.

Suw Charman-Anderson, a social software consultant and a writer, wrote in 2006:

We don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don’t need arbiters of taste. There are so many blogs out there reviewing software and web apps and films and books and every other sort of creativity that we don’t need to rely on the media’s old gatekeepers telling us what we should like.

We do, however, still need help. There’s just too much stuff around for us to know what’s out there, to keep up with what’s good, what works for us, what is worth investigation. What we need are curators. And we need them badly.

Meanwhile, some commentators of the BuzzMachine blog by Mr. Jarvis add some other roles:

• Tom B. says: ”This next generation of editors should not only synthesize, but expand on bodies of work. They should translate it into other forms long and short, video and audio, so it reaches a broader audience. The community, theoretically, will have natural ‘editors’ among them.”
• Dan Kennedy cannot imagine a major investigative series coming together without deep involvement on the part of skilled editors. ”I’m talking about leadership, the ability to find holes in stories and suggest ways to fill them, being ahead of the curve on what ought to be covered — all that good stuff. And, yes, inspire the troops.”

Our own experiences with multi-media, crowd-sourced and interactive journalism

Humane Birth: In 2006 we engaged Gazeta Wyborcza’s readers to review all the maternity wards in 413 Polish hospitals. Thanks to the internet we received 40 thousand reviews from young mothers who gave a birth there. We needed 170 people - editors, researchers, volunteers - to edit these reviews to make a reliable guide on hospitals!