I woke up in the middle of the night and was having trouble getting back to sleep, so I checked Twitter. “Earthquake” was a trending topic, so I clicked.
Hundreds of tweets reported an earthquake in Indonesia, causing buildings to sway in Jakarta. Twitter was reporting location, near Java, and magnitude, 7.3, and reporting on a tsunami warning. Not a peep from Google News or AP. When I searched “earthquake” in Google News, I got older quakes.
And the tweets were coming in by the hundreds, 700, 800 and more just in the time it took me to tweet. Many, of course, were retweets, but the original tweets were detailed and powerful, people tweeting about buildings swaying and being evacuated and chandeliers shaking (I presumed that “shaking hardly” probably meant shaking hard, not hardly shaking, and my affirmative response came back in minutes from the other side of the world). Twitpic and Mobypicture photos documented the evacuations.
When AP finally weighed in several minutes later, it reported no tsunami warning. Later reports, of course, included the tsunami warning.
No comparison. When news breaks, Twitter will tell you more information faster and more accurately than any other source. Yes, the initial tweets include conflicting accounts (I read the scale at 7.0, 7.3 and 7.4). But so do the news reports. And I saw no tweets saying there wasn’t a tsunami warning. That incorrect report came from the AP, when I saw dozens, if not hundreds of tweets correctly reporting the warning.
By the time the tsunami warning was canceled, I learned that from Twitter, too. And I didn’t bother to check Google News or AP. I was ready to go back to sleep and I didn’t have time to wait for them.
Great point that “When news breaks, Twitter will tell you more information faster and more accurately than any other source.”
One little detail to add: It is the people on Twitter who are the source of information. That staff will never be large or diverse enough to consistently break news faster than the staff of “citizens” on Twitter.
Still, news professionals can use their Twitter activity to be part of that stream of information. Or, they can help filter that realtime stream into something easier for non-Twitter users to consume. For innovate news professionals, the possibilities to incorporate social media into their roles are seemingly endless.
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I agree 100 percent. Thanks, Kevin.
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Agreed as well. Loved your analysis, Steve. I couldn’t agree with you more and you’re right on with that quote Kevin highlighted. That’s one of the reasons I started Breaking Tweets and I’ll be doing more with it in the coming weeks/months.
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