What can the new multimedia Twitter offer journalists?

Twitter is launching a serious overhaul of its design, adding more multimedia options. An attempt to move people away from Twitter apps to using the tool via twitter.com perhaps?

The key changes as far as news organisations and journalists using Twitter are concerned are the additions of embedded video and images – e.g. rather than following a link to an image on TwitPic that image will appear within the tweet.

When reporting on a live or breaking news event using Twitter, journalists can now offer readers more and a more user-friendly, all-in-one experience. I can also see clever journalists using the embedded feature to tease stories with video snippets and by giving their Twitter audience more content encourage those followers to visit a news site and engage there too.

In terms of newsgathering, the new design should also prove useful. When a tweet is clicked, a sidebar showing details of the author or subject will appear, as well as relevant @replies, a map of where it was sent from if geotagged and other tweets by that author. Essentially, it’ll offer journalists a more efficient way to build up a profile of an individual tweet or tweeter and assess how useful that information or contact might be to their story.

The changes will be rolled out across all accounts eventually – for now, you can see more details about the redesign on the newtwitter site.

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