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Dec
22
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This may well be a first (and hopefully not too common an occurrence). Via Jeff Jarvis, a passenger who was in a plane crash in Denver literally Twitters from the scene as soon as he gets out.
Surely cynical hack X can’t still now say Twitter isn’t useful to journalists. There you go, a perfect eyewitness for a pretty major story (although it probably helps to be on Twitter so you can introduce yourself before leaping in for an interview request).
The other argument I often hear against using Twitter, from a journalism (or PR) point of view is that it’s impossible to find news like this because they don’t how to follow and it’s such a vast space that its impossible to stumble across anybody Tweeting breaking news.
Well, yes. And then no. Stumbling across a breaking news Twitter feed by chance would be pretty unlikely. But knowing how to target possible breaking news is another.
It’s as simple as this: first set up a TweetBeep alert for stuff specific to you. Second, start using Twitscoop, which shows you a cloud of hot keywords being Tweeted. I’ve integrated the widget into my Netvibes, which I’m rarely off, so can pick up if something’s got the site a-Twitter.
Finally, if news breaks, just use Twitter search to see who’s tweeting about what. So, in this example, looking for plane crash, plane or even Denver would probably return a few relevant hits. Or, even better, if there’s a hashtag, you’ve got all the content you need right there.
Once you’ve got this set up and into the mindset, you can probably have all the relevant information on Twitter in just a few minutes. I’ve even seen a journalist friend of mine Twitter that he’s “grateful to TweetpBeep for giving him a story”.
It’s things like this that show why Twitter is so useful for breaking news and is not just some form of bastard child of the Facebook status.
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:18 am
I was using Twitter to get the results of Strictly Come Dancing, The US Election adn BBC Sports Personality – small fries i know.
But my point is that if you are actively following enough people, you won’t miss out on any events in the news, it can help to cut through a lot of media noise.
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am
Yeah, Woohoo!!
Gonna get tweetering (twittering?), integrating all my new sources, thanks for the comprehensive heads up, just what I needed.
Still, this is a job for next week, this week is all about traditional things like roasting chestnuts on an open fire.