Gary Andrews

That today is Twitter’s fifth birthday is an indication of exactly how fast time can seem to move in the world of social networking. About three and a half years ago, promoted by Ben Ayers, I signed up to Twitter. I don’t think either of us quite knew how influential Twitter would become (even if we never stopped banging on about its importance at work).

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration (albeit one with no intentional hyperbole behind it) to say that Twitter has changed my life.

Twitter had been across my radar for six months before that. I’d even started looking into how it could be used with the website and reporting of the local commercial station I was working for at the time, before I moved to the bright lights of London.

At first, I think I confined myself to people I knew. Then started branching out to people they knew, or followed people who followed me and it kind of took off from there, as I gradually moved from having virtual conversations with people to meeting them in real life.

I still remember the first proper Twitterer I met in real life who I’d previously only spoken to on Twitter beforehand. Darika Ahrens came into my then workplace to pitch for some business – and DMed me the day before to say hello. It seemed like a novelty at the time, exciting even.

Now, I’d think nothing of saying hi to a random Twitter person I’d been following for a while. And Darika’s become a brilliant friend, not to mention being the first person I’d go to if I wanted to sound out an idea about social media.

I remember the first Twestival I went to. Colleagues at work thought it was slightly strange that I was going to party with a bunch of people, many of whom had never met each other before. Now, a Twitter meetup seems normal. Of course, I’ve dragged friends along to assorted Twitter events. We all use the service in a different way, which is one of the joys of Twitter.

I’ve made other friends through social media too. Without Twitter, it’s doubtful there would have ever been a twofootedtackle podcast, or at least not one with so many different guests (some of whom have become great friends as well). I’ve met some amazing people, and been afforded some amazing opportunities as a result.

Five years ago, the job I currently do wouldn’t have existed. Nor the job before that. I work with Twitter on a daily basis (it’s not the only thing I do, I hasten to add).  It continues to fascinate, entertain and challenge me. Without Twitter, I certainly wouldn’t have my current job.

Then there’s the way Twitter has evolved and continues to evolve. Sure, you’ll get people (myself included a vast amount of the time) wittering away about everyday mundanities – although I’ve rarely had such a large amount of replies as when I asked about the best way to remove mould from my bathroom.

But more than that, you’ll get people who use it to share information and use it for their profession, be it journalism, PR or celebrity (or other).

The rise of celebrities on Twitter added another dimension to the site. It felt a bit weird when the big names, complete with all their new followers, invaded Twitter (I still maintain Phillip Schofield had a bigger effect than any other celebrity in the UK when he first joined).

Then there’s the newsgathering aspects, and even using it to challenge governments or coordinate aid efforts, as we’ve seen in Egypt and Japan recently.

When, in 2008, I blogged about tracking a breaking news story (in this case, the attempted suicide bombing in Exeter) using Twitter and other social media, it was a slightly unusual way of treating the newsgathering process. Today, I suspect any journalist covering a breaking story would immediately head onto Twitter and start searching.

Twitter has given me a lot of laughs, contacts, career help, new friends, helped create a podcast, fuelled my love of football and, at times, been a source of comfort, especially when I ended up in hospital, alone and scared with no idea what was wrong with me.

Like it or not, and for better or for worse, Twitter has changed the way we see the world. And, I suspect, as new users join and start using the service in different ways, it will continue to evolve.

Now, who wants to know what I had for lunch?

written by Gary \\ tags: newsgathering, Twitter, twitter's birthday, twofootedtackle podcast

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

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

It’s always difficult to gauge exactly how widely Twitter has extended outside of the tech and social media crowd (and, to a certain extent, the media). On one hand, I have Twitter on in the background every day at work and find it increasingly useful. On the other hand, I went out to dinner the other night with a couple of friends who I did my journalism training with and neither of them had heard of it.

But just when I learn to the other hand and start to wonder if it generally has a wider application, something like this comes along.

Essentially, The Chicago Tribute has an online Twitter presence who interacts with other users and it was to this profile that other Twitters turned when a few of them started asking about some kind of panic at a local plaza they were hearing about.

Not only did the Tribute’s Twitter feed reply, it got back to them about twenty minutes later with the full story, verified by the paper’s journalists, before crediting the breaking story to the Tweeter who first told him (or her) about it.

Thanks to the retweeting of the story by other users, it turned into one of the most widely read stories on the site. Neither the story nor the subsequent hits would have been as big had it not been for Twitter.

This small event is the perfect example of how new and old media can work together to create great journalism, and it’s the journalism aspect of Twitter that excites me the most.

At it’s most basic, it’s like the pub, where plenty of conversations are taking place [1]. Some of them are meaningless, but some may be interesting to the journalist and make a great story. Older journalists will have done more than their fair share of pub stories, while whenever I was sent to cover a story in an area I didn’t know, I’d usually head down the pub, as this was one of the best places for background and context.

Twitter can be seen as the pub. Or perhaps a trendy, if somewhat dilapidated, wine bar. That has poor acoustics, and the clientele speak in clipped tones. But is up to date with the latest news from the area.

Twitter, then, goes beyond just searching for people on location for a breaking news event – it allows those users to break the news to the journalists, although that only seems to have happened because of interaction. If the Chicago Tribute’s Twitter account didn’t bother to interact with its followers, then it wouldn’t have got the story (or got the story as quickly).

That, for me, perfectly encapsulates what social media is all about, and why it complements journalism rather than threatens it [2]. And why every journalist should at least be aware of how useful Twitter can be for newsgathering.

It may not have as many people signing up as Facebook did, and nor will it probably take off on such a mass scale as Facebook did. But that’s not necessarily the point. As my colleague Ben is fond of saying, it’s who you follow, not how many you follow.

The next question is how many news organisations have a presence of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, and other sites, and regularly interact with readers? Those who don’t, or haven’t even considered it, are potentially missing a trick.

It’s why it’s important that Twitter users are able to receive SMS messages in the UK and Europe. The site cut this service due to spiraling costs they incurred from mobile providers.

It’s one of the most useful services Twitter offers, and for journalists is a key part of why Twitter is so useful. Paul Bradshaw has started a campaign to get mobile operators to strike a deal with Twitter – the Facebook group is here.

[1] I have a feeling I’ve shamelessly stolen this analogy from Joanna Geary. Sorry Jo – think of it as social media analogy sharing

[2] Quite whether the same is true, at this current stage, for PR, I’m not so sure. It’s very useful, but nowhere near as useful as journalists are finding it. There’s definitely potential in there though, but as Jaz Cummins said to me at the Shoreditch Twit last week when I mentioned I was using Twitter for PR purposes, a lot of its users are still very much in the London or media-centric bubble and bursting through this bubble is the challenge. At least I think that’s what she was saying. My memory of the night is a tad hazy, but it was along those lines and is a very valid point. It’s certainly a major challenge for PR to work out how best to utilise the potential of Twitter.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: journalism, newsgathering, SMS, Twitter

Couple of fascinating posts on citizen journalism on BeetTV and Phil Bronstein on thoughts around citizen journalism. It has not, says Bronstein, taken off on a large scale. He also sums up the current position neatly:

“The whole concept of citizen journalism is still floating around waiting for a good example wave to carry it somewhere, and user-generated material has yet to be a huge hit within the media world unless someone with a Flip catches Brangelina running into a lamp post.”

Let’s up a quick recap first with the Condensed and Possibly Not Entirely Accurate History of Citizen Journalism According To Gary.

So, in the beginning there was the media who had journalists who produced news. There was also the people, and the people generally watched or read the media and the media thought this was largely very agreeable indeed and nobody knew what the people thought because it wasn’t deemed important and those people who did speak were usually retired colonels.

Anyway, then the internet came along and some of the people realised it gave them a chance to say what they thought and a very small percentage of the people tried their hand at journalism and a few of them were actually quite good at it.

Then the media discovered that the internet was important but weren’t quite sure how to handle it because while they were telling because that it was important, they’d noticed a few people were also telling the rest of the people that the internet and other stuff was important. Or, more commonly, telling the media where they’d got things wrong.

Some media tried to engage, others refused but gradually there was a realisation that the people could be useful to the media and that’s roughly where we are now.

The term Citizen Journalism is definitely a little misleading. It conjures up images of wannabe hacks slaving away all day at the internet trying to beat newspapers to the scoop and perhaps for a very short while this was the case. There was even a brief mad scramble by traditional media to sign these bloggers, much like the moment Electroclash was briefly musical genre of the moment and saw Fischerspooner signed to Ministry of Sound for £1m, nearly taking the whole thing down the pan.

That’s passed now, largely (and thankfully). Now the boundaries are a lot less clear. What’s the difference between a journalist and a blogger? Take Shiny Media. These are blogs, but essentially they’re a journalistic outlet that isn’t published in a newspaper or broadcast on the TV. Then you’ve got journalists who specifically work on the web but because it’s on a traditional media’s site it’s classified as journalism and not blogging.

Then you’ve got the bloggers who are definitely not journalists but know more about a specialist topic than journalists and have great contacts, so are essentially out-journalisming the journalists without even intending to.

Then you’ve got the bloggers who aren’t journalists or specialists but once in a while write something newsworthy or happen to be in the right place at the right time (or wrong time, depending on the event) and have something to say which is of interest to everybody.

This is without even touching on the likes of Flickr, Twitter and YouTube for newsgathering purposes. Often these are better than anything traditional media can gather, not because the journalists are bad at their job, but because they happen to be on the ground when the event starts. Jemima Kiss’s post on Twitter and the California Earthquake illustrates this nicely.

Right, so this is where we’re at. Journalism and the web as if painted by Jackson Pollack. Nobody really knows what they are any more, the whole system’s in some kind of blogistential crisis and really, we’d all probably be better off heading home for a cup of tea and a biscuit and forgetting about the whole thing.

But it’s not entirely shot and there a few levellers. Firstly, Citizen Journalism hasn’t killed the media, as was predicted a few years ago. If anything it’s enhanced the quality of news coverage. A Tweet or Flickr picture direct from the scene is invaluable no matter where you’re getting your news from.

Secondly, although you’ll get the odd person trying to make a living out of citizen journalism from the web, the majority of citizen journalists are a one-off. They happen to be by a newsworthy event, they take a picture, Tweet, make a blog post or take a video on their mobile phone. It’s news, and news organisations recognise it as such, even if the person behind it never does another newsworthy thing in their life. 

That its not yet successful on a large scale is not unexpected or necessarily a bad thing. While people appreciate that they can interact with journalists and submit their own ‘newsgathering’ not everybody’s going to want to do it all of the time.

Secondly, although there will always be bloggers and Twitterers writing around breaking news, although they’re not hard to search, it’s easier and less time consuming for the average person having it in a place they regularly visit and, largely, trust. Which is usually the website of traditional media.

Anybody who Tweets or blogs or posts photos about a newsworthy event they’ve seen or are part of are being citizen journalists, yet the term doesn’t quite fit them. They’re involved with the journalism process even if they don’t necessarily know it at the time.

For me, traditional media and citizen journalists have, for the time being, reached a reasonably happy medium. It will change. Things always change, especially when the web’s involved. Who knows, perhaps it will move closer to the traditional view of a citizen journalist. Perhaps it’ll shoot off in a completely different direction. Perhaps not.

But for the time being, we’re all now part of the newsgathering process, whether we like it or not, a journalism s a lot better of for it.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: BeetTV, breaking news, citizen journalism, Flickr, journalism, newsgathering, Phil Bronstein, Twitter