Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Posted by Steve Outing 4:33:47 AM
The Twitter Disaster
twitter
San Diego public radio station KPBS did a great job of Twittering the CA
wildfires -- and beyond.
A terrorist bomb kills dozens in your downtown. A tornado wipes out a nearby
town. A school shooting leaves scores dead.
In the not-so-distant past, I would have urged you to create a breaking-news
blog for your news site if any big story like those hit in your backyard.
Reporters would be asked to send in brief reports with bits of news. Editors
would look for tidbits from other sources to add to the fast-breaking blog.
Readers would have a constant, fairly regularly updated account of new
developments in the big story, as information surfaced. It would be a far cry
from the old days of newspaper reporters assembling information to craft a
story that, when ready, would go on the Web, in the print edition, on the TV
newscast, or radio news.
That's so 2004! You can still do it, and probably should. But the breaking-news
blog is about to be supplanted (or perhaps supplemented is a better word) by
the Twitter breaking-news feed.
So here's what you do next time a BIG story hits: As you send your reporters
out to cover the story, get them to post short bits of news (limited to 140
characters) to a Twitter feed that either you've set up for this story, or that
you keep ready for significant breaking news. With reporters filing short bits
from their cell phones, you'll be able to offer your audience new information
even faster than you could with a breaking-news blog. "Rescue crews just pulled
a body out from under the 12th Street Bridge." "Police are chasing an apparent
suspect on foot near the downtown library."
Feed this to your site and to subscribed cell phone alerts. Urge your readers
to "follow" your breaking-news Twitter stream from their own Twitter accounts.
I can hear some traditional-thinking editors scoffing. Fine, scoff away. But
important news is getting out ever faster, and I'll contend that it's important
to keep up, lest you be beaten by your Twittering competitors. (Excuse me, I
believe the correct vernacular is "tweeting competitors.")
"Putting news up that fast is dangerous and will lead to inaccurate information
being put out under our name," you say? OK, so add a cautionary warning that
this is raw news coverage from your reporters, and early reports could be
unverified. Make an effort to tweet updated information if an earlier report
proves wrong.
I got the idea for this blog item from Marshall Kirkpatrick's blog item from
last week, "Twitter is Paying My Rent," in which the new media consultant notes
that he increasingly is learning about new tech news developments from friends'
Twitter feeds -- before anyone has had a chance to blog about them, let alone
write a full news story. He picked up Twitter rumblings about Google's
acquisition of Jaiku before the news got out to the blogs, for example.
That should give reporters notice that Twitter is a potentially great source of
news tips. And news organizations can speed up the news cycle by tweeting
themselves on big stories as described above.
Twitter frivolous? Definitely not.
(Just to cover all the bases here, Twitter is one of several "presence"
services available now. I discussed some of the others, including Jaiku, in
this item on my personal blog earlier this week.)
Categories: Online/new media, Social Media, Online Services, Syndication &
Distribution, Mobile
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