Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Tweet

Twitter-quette: how do you want J.co.uk to cover events?

Judith Townend — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:40:49 +0000

There’s been quite a lot of discussion about how to behave on Twitter lately. Last week @charlesarthur said it was all about the links and got a few conflicting comments below his blog post about how to be interesting (or not) on Twitter.

Earlier in the week, one of @journalismnews followers said they didn’t like too many Tweets from an event, without prior warning.

So, over to you our lovely followers … Do you think we should have a specific events Twitter name for all events, or specific ones for each event we attend, which we’ll publicise the name for from @journalismnews?

Tweet back, or drop us a comment below.

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Conference tweets: live from two international journalism events

Judith Townend — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:35:59 +0000

We’re a little bit sad here at Journalism.co.uk towers that we didn’t get to go to either of this week’s major journalism conferences, the Global International Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Lillehammer, Norway and the Online News Association (ONA) in Washington DC.

But we got our web feelers out and collated these Twitters for your perusal.

Over at the ONA Twitter Search you can follow the Poynter Group, who are all twittering madly (you’ll need to create yourself an account to log in) and you can see the tweets from the first session of the morning here. The ONA has put together information about the Twitterers, discussion groups and podcasts here.

Or follow blogger supremo Pat Thornton, who was a little bit bored this afternoon…

Meanwhile over GIJC Twitterland we picked up this Tweet about Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Hajj – imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years.

We’ll be back with a better summary of the conferences’ outcomes next week, when we’ve spoken to a few more participants.

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Twittering the Californian bush fires

Laura Oliver — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:49:57 +0000

Two Twitter users in San Diego, California, have been posting updates on wild fires sweeping the south of the state.

Users Nate Ritter and Viss have combined eyewitness updates on the state of the fire with useful info for locals, like evacuation procedures and meeting points, showing just how well this device can be used in a news environment.

Yes, there are limitations: you have to know about Twitter before you’d come across something like this, and (as Ritter’s last Tweet says) at some point your Twitter correspondent may have to go to bed.

Still these guys, who are also posting photos of the fires to Flickr, seem to be providing more frequent updates than the mainstream media – bar local radio station KPBS, which has got in on the Twitter action too.

Not only do KPBS’ Tweets feature on their main site as a ‘Real-Time Updates’ section, but the outlet goes even further in showing off Twitter’s scope using alerts to direct readers to local authority announcements, a url for a Google map of the fire, traffic updates and addresses for evacuation centres.

Figures are frequently the focus of these alerts and these are later fleshed out into full-blown news pieces.

KPBS obviously sees the one service complementing the other, but other news organisations may disagree: why ‘leak’ breaking news through Twitter first? Because a local readership will return to the site again and again for the public information aspect of the service and stay for the more in-depth news analysis.

Whether KPBS uses Twitter on a day-to-day basis or has rolled it out for this special news event I’m not sure, but I’d like to know whether other papers are employing the device and in what ways?

How does the editorial process work and what are the limitations/freedoms for journalists of writing news alerts like this?

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