Gary Andrews

Nearly ten years ago, the way I first knew about the 9/11 attacks was when I received a text from a friend telling me to turn on the TV. Today, I logged onto Facebook when I woke up, after a push notification to my phone, and saw my news feed filled up with statuses bout the death of Osama bin Laden. Same device, a very different way of receiving the news.

Not that seeing breaking news spread virally on social networks is in any way new these days, but the news of bin Laden’s death shows, beyond doubt, of how integrated Twitter and other networks have become for breaking news and are the best places to head to for updates, if you can work out how to cut through the chatter.

What was interesting about this story, from a news and social media perspective, was the timing and nature of the news. Many big breaking news stories tend to be naturally chaotic as journalists scramble for facts and people Tweet without any knowledge of what’s going on – the on-the-scene Tweets tend to be fairly jumbled and it takes a bit of time to sift and verify, even if it gives you a general picture of what’s going on.

In this case, the news broke late into the evening in America and during the night in Britain, while the actual event happened in Pakistan. Without being awake during this time, I’d hazard this probably made it slightly easier to track, given there would be less people online (slightly).

Secondly, this was an unusual breaking news story insofar as although there were updates on social media from the scene and then from elsewhere as the news leaked out, it was still more of a controlled story than many big breaking news stories.

In this case, journalists were on a surer footing from the off (and probably had several articles prepared), which probably explains why the majority of articles and Tweets I’ve seen shared this morning have been from news organisations such as the Guardian and New York Times, rather than blogs or Twitter users – although Mashable, as ever, features very highly in articles I’ve seen shared.

But despite this, Twitter and other social media has shown itself to be the place to track the news. Sohaib Athar, aka @ReallyVirtual on Twitter, inadvertently liveblogged the US operation against bin Laden, while @Pauliemyers’ Twitpic shows the earliest mentions of the operation via Google Realtime (an increasingly useful search engine).

Elsewhere, the New York Times has detailed how the news and confirmation of bin Laden’s death starting leaking on Twitter, primarily from Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, Keith Urbahn. Interestingly, and showing the importance of a trusted source, although Urbahn wasn’t the first to Tweet the news, his credibility as a source meant that he was credited with breaking the news pr, at the very least, the primary Twitter source being cited.

As the news spread, other aspects of social media came forward. On Facebook, as well as news feeds filling up with the news, the Osama bin Laden is dead group, originally set up as more of a conspiracy theory group, became a focal point for collating updates. Google Maps updated to pinpoint the area where bin Laden was killed, while users of Storify, rapidly becoming an incredibly useful curation tool, started pulling together the strands of the story.

And, as a breaking news story, this has moved quicker than usual from social media to traditional media. The story is no longer breaking, and the analysis from experts begins, as tends to be the case. But, as ever, social media is definitely not something you can view as separate from the story. As the journalists Tweet and collate the information, it’s become a complete part of the fabric of newsgathering and news viewing.

[h/t to @SueLlewellyn, who has Tweeted many of these links I've listed above.]

written by Gary \\ tags: al-Qaeda, al-Qaida, bin Laden, breaking news, Google Realtime, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, Storify, Twitter, USA

For the last week, like many people I suspect, I’ve been semi-permanently watching the ongoing situation in Japan, from the early hours of the earthquake and tsunami, through to the current nuclear and humanitarian crisis. It’s hard not to get through an edition of the news without a lump in the throat many evenings at the moment.

From a grimly professional point of view, though, I found it fascinating that during the earthquake, the immediate response of some people was to grab a video camera and start filming, before posting the footage to YouTube or other social media sites.

There was a time that most sensible people would run away, while the journalists would be the only ones running towards the disaster with cameras rolling. Yet now recording seems second nature. Perhaps you could go as far as to say citizen journalism as a phrase should be discarded if that’s one of the first instincts. All of us on social media are becoming citizen journalists.

What hasn’t changed, fundamentally, though, is the way the narrative is told. Social media makes it clearer in the initial phase, through the use of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but once the often shocking initial footage clears and the basic facts are in place, then the storytellers, the journalists, thread the whole thing together (for better or for worse). As Richard Sambrook Tweeted, the need for foreign correspondents is still there.

This isn’t to say the sources aren’t different or more immediate, especially in the case of Twitter. And social media is also becoming, naturally, the quickest way to reach friends, families and loved ones.

Do users of social media, as Mashable asks, have a responsibility with what they post during times of disaster and crisis? Perhaps this isn’t the first thing on their mind in a situation like Japan or Libya. Although it’s also very easy for rumours and misinformation to spread like wildfire via Twitter. Again, this is where fact checkers are never a bad thing to have.

One final tangental thought. A friend remarked that there appear to be more disasters and the like occurring around the world today. I wonder if it’s more than these worldwide disasters were always there, always happened, but we didn’t hear about them, or at least didn’t hear about them so quickly.

Twenty-four hour global news had already made the world small. Social media has made it even smaller, so we’re now more aware of bad things happening quicker, to put it crudely. And, oddly, you can almost see the same news values an editor might pick, being played out on a more global scale. Bad things attract more attention, generally because they’re so unusual.

Doesn’t mean they’re not heartbreaking though. Thousands of lives lost are still thousands of lives lost, whether we hear about them within five hours, fives days, or five weeks of the event.

written by Gary \\ tags: breaking news, Japan, newsgathering, social media

Occasionally a service pops onto the internet that’s just brimming with potential for journalism (and the rest of the media). It doesn’t need any complicated explanations – you just plug and go and start having a lot of fun. Audioboo is one of those services.

Ostensibly it’s a very simple app for the iPhone that allows you to record a ‘boo’, which gets sent to the Audioboo website, where there are also the standard social networking functions. You can also embed it into your own website. This boo can literally be anything, but it’s normally short and snappy – rarely over two minutes. It’s a bit like an aural version of Seesmic or Twitter, although that’s not entirely accurate.

The Guardian used this to good effect on their liveblog during their coverage of the G20 summit and the accompanying protests. Mix with text and video, it gave you short, snappy reports from journalists on the ground.

This, to me, is exciting.

Let’s backtrack to when I was a radio reporter. It’s not a million miles away from what I would be doing for assorted news stories – often standing near a breaking news story (usually in a cold and/or wet place. Big news stories always seem to break when the elements are at their worst, just to torment news reporters) with a microphone in hand, describing what was going on for the benefit of our listeners.

Depending on what equipment was available on the day you’d either get a radio quality OB unit (although this would inevitably decide not to work or be in use when big stories broke), a mobile phone, or you’d just end up doing an ‘as live’ report into your recording equipment.

This is why Audioboo excites me. The quality, as far as I can tell, is decent – certainly better than using a mobile. Sure, it has limitations – you can’t do a two-way, for example. But the principle of just sending a quick report of where you are and what you’re doing… hell, that’s no different from standard radio journalism and opens up a wealth of possibilities.

If I were still in radio, I’d be getting onto our technical and website bods to make sure we could send Boos direct to the newsroom. How liberating would it be if you can send an immediate report back in decent quality without having to do a pre-record or even take up precious time from the journalist at the other end who’ll be recording your call.

And if a radio journalist found themselves somewhere without any recording equipment (maybe during off-duty time), it’d be easy to get a report back to the office.

But Audioboo goes way beyond that. Citizen journalism is usually, these days, a fairly vague term that’s just used to lump ‘the internet’ together but in this case it suits Audioboo perfectly. If newsrooms encourage listeners to send in their ‘boos’ from news stories, there’s a whole wealth of material that can be collected freeing up precious time for the journalist (and please God, meaning that we have to do less vox pops. I’ve yet to met a journalist who enjoys vox popping. That said, there is a time and a place and they do make for good radio).

Then there’s the radio shows themselves. Audioboo can add another easy, interactive aspect to any DJ’s show, or any podcast as well (it’s certainly something I’d like to play with in the future for the twofootedtackle podcast when I get a moment). Given how simple it is, there are so many possibilities.

Of course, it’s not just radio journalists this can be useful for. It should be reasonably easy to work them into TV news (I’d imagine), and the Guardian have already shown how any news website can work them into coverage. Again, any newspaper – be it national, regional or local – should be looking to work this into their site.

Inviting ‘boos’ from the public is essentially opening up audio is the same way camera phones and the like did for pictures, and that’s now a staple part of any news coverage.

The only downside. I don’t yet have an iPhone so can’t Audioboo myself. But it’s a concept that really excites me and it’s been a long time since I’ve said that about any web service, no matter how much I love or use them.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: audio, Audioboo, breaking news, radio journalism, radio news

This is cool. It’s a picture taken by Marcus Warren from The Telegraph of the paper’s newsroom. That thingy on the left-hand screen of Twitterfall, an application that lets you track topics via a cascade in real time. This makes it invaluable for tracking breaking news stories via Twitter.

For a bit more on Twitterfall, and a quick guide to using this excellent application, Paul Bradshaw has more.

Now, regardless of whether you think Twitter is the second coming or view it as a place for trendy media types to hang out, the fact that the Telegraph has a Twitter app on a big screen in their newsroom suggests that they view it as a part of the newsgathering process (as it has been for a while now).

It’s not just journalists who can make use of this. PR can use it to react in real time to those occasional crises that require an immediate bit of reputation management. It’s also useful for seeing how a story you’ve put out there develops.

Twitter may be the flavour of the month, but when you strip back the hype it is, quite simply, another communication tool – and a very basic one at that. The really exciting stuff comes with third-party apps like Twitterfall and the countless other tools that are being developed.

This small mircoblogging site is now part of the media process, be it news or PR. Get used to it.

EDIT: You’ll note in the title that I’ve said need to know how to get the best out of Twitter. Not necessarily get on Twitter. There’s enough stuff out there that you can quite effectively get a lot out of Twitter without actually being a member. However, I’d still maintain that if you want to get the best out of the site – especially when it comes to engaging online – it’s helpful to give it a go and sign up. You may not get it or, after an initial flurry, decide not to post very often. But at least you have a presence on there if it’s needed.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: breaking news, breaking news on Twitter, Daily Telegraph, newsgathering, Twitter, Twitterfall

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.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: breaking news, Denver plane crash, hashtags, Twitter

With every major breaking news story, social media sites and sources keep outdoing themselves. The events in Mumbai have proved to be no exception, with Twitter once again leading the way.

Techcrunch notes that Twitter was talking about the terrorist attacks before the media cottoned on to the fact there was something major happening in the Indian City, and says that there’s no doubt that Twitter should now be considered a proper news source.

“You can jump up and down and shout all you want that Twitter isn’t a real news source. But all you are doing is viewing the world through a reality lens that’s way outdated. People want information fast and raw from people who are on the scene. If it gets a little messy along the way, that’s ok. We’ll soon see tools that help us distill the really good stuff out of the stream anyway.”

Global Voices back this up and goes as far to say that Twitter gives a better sense of what’s happening on the ground than traditional media could do.

“While the TV and media reports have been accused of using sensationalism and inflicting more terror from rumors, the twitter feeds portray the real sense of what is happening and how people are coping with it”

Twitter’s accuracy as a news source is picked up on in both posts, but it’s worth noting that with any breaking news, the exact story can often be unclear. I’ve worked on or followed numerous breaking stories where the information is contradictory, and what is taken as fact one hour can be shown up as utter garbage the next.

That isn’t necessarily the fault of the media or journalists – it just reflects the chaotic nature of breaking news, as do Twitter updates. But one of the most valuable aspects of using Twitter as a news source is the immediacy of the Tweets, and the swiftness with which incorrect information is corrected.

How accurate is Twitter? Well, look at the relevant  # channel for any given story and with a small amount of cross referencing, it’s easier to built up a picture of which tweets are giving the most accurate picture.

It’s not just the 140 character Tweets that make Twitter so useful for breaking stories. As Duffman notes, video-streaming applications like 12 Seconds, Seesmic, Phreadz, and Qik all post to Twitter feeds direct from a mobile.

“It’s this element of citizen journalism that some professional hacks may not like because they’ve become so used to using news wires to break stories that all they have to give them an edge over the rest of us is the quality of the coverage. Others recognise its potential and get involved.

Twitter empowers citizen journalists and allows them to not only report on on the spot but more importantly, enables them to reach a huge audience. Its not a complete solution as it lacks the objectivity in the same way embedded journalism does. However, it doesn’t go through the usual news media prism and is received without being framed to suit anyone else’s agenda. That, for me is its true value.”

It’s not just Twitter that was a useful news source for the Mumbai attacks. Charles Arthur reports that Flickr – the photo sharing site – quickly got a stream of pictures up direct from the scene (and it’s pretty hard to question their authenticity).

There’s also been Google maps mashups, along with the more traditional source of blogging and an ever-changing Wikipedia page. Journalism.co.uk and The Guardian have good roundups.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that anybody who tracks the right topics across these platforms will be able to pull together a pretty accurate picture of how the story’s unfolding – a picture that may well be more accurate than news being reported through more traditional outlets.

This is something that became readily apparent during my tracking of the Exeter bomb blast in Giraffe earlier this year and has already grown beyond my findings back then.

Tracking the story via social media is, of course, no substitute for being on the ground. But if you’ve got a reporter liaising frequently with a colleague who’s pulling in as much information as possible from social media (and other sources), that can produce some impressive journalism.

What’s also fascinating is that for the Mumbai terror attacks, most major news websites were liveblogging. It shows how online reporting has moved on in just a few years. When Nosemonkey liveblogged the 7/7 bombings, much of the mainstream media treated it as an interesting curiosity. Now, a liveblog for a major news event – complete with links to other blogs, Twitter feeds, maps mashups, and the like – is pretty much industry standard.

With each major news event, it becomes clear that social media often has the most immediate coverage – and it’s a foolhardy journalist who chooses to ignore this.

That said, while social media may be the place to start looking for news during the event and in the immediate aftermath, once it comes to taking the story on and providing richer background analysis, traditional media comes back into its own. It has the time and the resources to devote to journalism.

What events like the Mumbai terror attacks show is that we all have the potential to be online citizen journalists. It’s never been easier to get breaking news out on the web – all you need is a half-decent mobile phone.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: breaking news, Fickr, Google Maps, Mumbai, Mumbai terror attacks, online news, Twitter

Who says blogs can’t break news? In an age where most footballer-penned blogs are full of bland commentary and meticulously on-message, Dean Windass’s post for his weekly ITV.com blog about considering his future at Hull if he didn’t get picked came as somewhat of a surprise. But it was also a great story, and one a journalism would usually have to work hard to get out of a player.

Unsurprisingly, it was the blogs who picked up on it first, before the local newspaper, the Daily Mail, the Vital Football Hull fan site and ESPN,all done with just a couple of emails alerting people to the story. AFter that, things snowballed.

Yes, the blog may have been hosted by a major media company, but the story, which started life on a small part of the site, quickly found its way around the internet and onto the fans forums. Just from one blog post. And the majority of stories credited the blog.

There’s news in them blogs alright – and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: blogging, breaking news, Dean Windass, news online