Twitter and hashtags at conferences – questions to ask

A post from Travolution fits in neatly with a discussion Journalism.co.uk has been having with some followers: how best to provide live coverage from conferences?

As an alternative (and additional service) to @journalismnews, we set up @journalism_live on Twitter, and it’s grown relatively steadily in followers. However, we are aware that some people, do not find immediate updates from conferences particularly helpful.

So this post by Kevin May, about covering a travel conference (the Travolution Summit 2009) provides some interesting points for debate. It discusses whether publishing a Tweet-stream behind a panel is useful. May also flags up this point, as an aside:

“A fellow conference organiser told me recently that his organisation felt that the quality of coverage suffered as a result of delegates spending their time tweeting whereas in the past they might have been busily crafting more analytical coverage.”

This question from Neal Baldwin in the comments is also interesting (this could apply to using Twitterfall pages on site homepages too.)

“Can I ask a question with my ‘old media’ hat on? If someone tweets a libellous comment, say about a speaker for example, and you ‘broadcast’ it to all via your wall, don’t you become the publisher and therefore liable?”

Lastly, in another comment, Mark Hodson suggests appointing an ‘official twitterer’ of comments, to ‘free up the bloggers and journalists to add their own comments and intepretations’.

(via @adders)

2 thoughts on “Twitter and hashtags at conferences – questions to ask

  1. Martin Belam

    In the last few days I’ve tried to “Live Twitter” an event (#jeecamp) and also be at an event and not “Live Twitter” it (#isslon). I think I ended up making more notes at the former between tweets, than I did at the latter. Whether they were better or not is another matter.

  2. Pingback: How Westminster students covered last week’s Journalism in Crisis conference | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

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