A tweet from @NiemanLab just called my attention to a Universal Hub blog post about a man hit by a trolley.
As @NiemanLab noted, this was a breaking news report based solely on Twitter. From the report, I can read and link to eyewitness reports from Mark Epstein (@epstemar), who identifies himself as a student at Northeastern University, and from Jeff Purser (@jeffpurser) of Cambridge. They provide details, such as that the victim was conscious when placed in the ambulance and this sequence from Purser: “Heard horn. Brakes. Thump. Ambulance responded quickly.”
While Epstein and Purser are both named sources (though not yet verified; a reporter working the story should try to contact them directly), one source in the Hub report is unnamed, @Boston_Fireman, a firefighter who reported the victim had been removed from underneath the trolley car.
I also can see a photo Epstein took, apparently from a nearby building and posted on Twitpic, showing the trolley, emergency vehicles and stopped traffic.
Other tweets, particularly from Epstein, provide more details: officials looking under the car with flashlights, the train was evacuated, tracks taped off, the E Line shut down from Ruggles to Parker St., the victim was yelling on the stretcher.
Both men used a hashtag, #MBTA, which you can check for more information (mostly people retweeting Epstein and commenting about transit safety). Epstein also used @BostonTweet, a Boston news Twitter stream, though it has no more tweets on the incident. Another person who witnessed at least the aftermath, Marcus Moche (@mmoche), didn’t provide much information in his tweets, but might be more helpful in an interview.
The tweets don’t provide a perfect or full report. I wouldn’t settle for a breaking-news account based solely on Twitter. You need to connect with Purser and Epstein and verify their identities and accounts and ask them more questions (including who else was around, so you can talk to more people). You need to talk to officials. You need better photos and video taken from much closer to the scene.
But if you’re not using Twitter to cover breaking news stories like this, you’ll miss important details and eyewitnesses who are willing to tell their stories. And the people who are following Twitter may get a better idea what happened than the people reading your story.
Speaking of stories, neither of the Boston newspaper sites has a story that I could find. Not sure if it happened too late for their morning deadlines and they’ll catch up today (long after Twitter). Or maybe because the person was injured and not killed, they decided it wasn’t newsworthy. Or maybe they didn’t report it because it was a suicide attempt (some tweets speculated about that).
If this event didn’t rise to the threshold of newsworthiness for Boston metro news organizations, that doesn’t make the points about the value of Twitter any less pertinent. Twitter would be even more useful in a bigger story.
Thanks for fleshing this out! I was really impressed by the Universal Hub post since, as you note, it includes most of what you’d find in a traditional news report. And I was disappointed to not find anything about the incident in the Boston papers.
Here’s a quick post from the firefighter behind that account in March. There’s been some other back-and-forth about it with the official Boston Fire Department, but I can’t find it. (@Boston_Police is a great, official feed, like listening to the police scanner.)
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A new comment on Universal Hub says Boston.com reports the man suffered a foot injury that was not life-threatening. I can’t find that report, which might say more about me than it does about Boston.com. But the point is that this was a routine breaking-news story and we should be using Twitter as a reporting tool on such stories.
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Thanks for the link!
I suspect the reason it didn’t make the papers was the timing – around 11 p.m., when the presses are already rolling. I just happened to call up Twitter while watching Colbert …
But, really, what Boston_Fireman does, as a sort of hobby, is listen to the scanner (cool Boston thing: there’s a Web rebroadcast of the Boston fire channels!). Maybe I’m getting old, but I remember working in newsrooms and bureaus where you were always supposed to keep one ear on. Given what’s been going on of late with the Green Line, I find it hard to believe somebody getting plowed into by a trolley in a public location wouldn’t warrant at least a brief.
There was another story broken on Twitter yesterday – that Google Maps now has MBTA data. It was pretty funny getting a press release yesterday from the T announcing a big press conference at South Station this morning that didn’t mention what the announcement would be, so they could spring this cool new thing on us, because people were already tweeting about the Maps integration.
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What is happening in downtown Boston that resembles fog or smog?
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I’m sorry, Denis, but I can’t help. I work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I would check on Twitter and/or Boston media sites. I don’t live in or have a particular interest in Boston. I just wrote about this because of my interest in using social media for journalism.
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Thank you. WILCO
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I believe it’s just fog.
I saw it from Readville (southernmost part of Boston, about 10 miles from downtown), most impressive: Looked like this big black blob enveloping downtown. By now, it’s moved inland.
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[…] Twitter is for journalists covering breaking news stories — an earthquake in Indonesia, a trolley accident in Boston, the floods in North Dakota. With the exception of the North Dakota floods post, which made my top […]
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