I will be leading three Twitter workshops for journalists in Ottawa next week, and I’d like some help from journalists using Twitter.
Please share your best stories (with links, if possible, to tweets/stories) about using Twitter as a journalism tool in the comments here:
- What’s been your best experience using Twitter to connect with sources on a breaking news story?
- What’s been your best experience crowdsourcing a story using Twitter?
- What’s the best story idea or tip you got from Twitter?
- How has Twitter helped you monitor events, sources and issues on your beat?
- What’s been your best experience live-tweeting an event?
- What’s been your best experience feeding tweets from the public into a blog, liveblog or web site?
- Have you used Twitter successfully (or unsuccessfully) for interviewing?
- What’s been your most innovative use of Twitter for journalism?
- How have you used Twitter to build traffic for your site or blog?
- What are some helpful links you have found through Twitter, or ways you have shared links through Twitter?
- What kinds of people do you follow and why? How did you find them?
- How has Twitter helped your writing?
- What problems have you encountered using Twitter as a journalist?
- How do you verify information you gather or sources you encounter using Twitter?
And if I wasn’t smart enough to ask the right question for your story, just tell me the story anyway.
I also need to update my Twitter tips for journalists. So I want you to share your best tips for journalists using Twitter. But don’t share them here. Share them on Twitter, replying to me and/or using the #twjtips hashtag.
I’ll prime the pump with two stories and tips from those journalists. Twitter was an invaluable tool for Bill Doskoch of toronto.ctv.ca in telling the story of a SWAT team swarming the office of a guy whose neighbor had seen him brandishing a handgun. The officers learned he had just assembled the toy handgun from a Legos kit. Bill’s account:
I was working the night it happened, and first heard of a gun call, but it didn’t sound like much. Next morning, I saw a Twitter link to Jeremy Bell’s blog post. I tracked him down at his office and eventually got a telephone interview with him.
He didn’t want to identify who sicced the cops on him, but by reading his Twitter feed, I could figure it out by myself. I contacted Michael Dent, did an interview, and he was kind enough to supply the picture. As near as I could tell, I was the only reporter to interview both parties and get the photo.
It’s not like great stories fall into my lap every day through Twitter, but it should still be part of every reporter’s toolbox. I would stress to young journos, however, that reporting should be treated as an active process, not a passive one.
The other story comes from Kate Dubinski, a reporter for the London Free Press, who wrote for the Canadian Journalism Project about live-tweeting the high-profile Bandidos murder trial — six men charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. I encourage you to read her full post, but here’s a passage:
In my view, the potential for Twitter is huge: we were first in getting out the verdicts, for example, which were then typed up for our site by people back in the newsroom. It offers a way to get people into the courtroom (or city council chambers) in a way that you can’t do with print or television. We interacted with people we never would have tracked down if it hadn’t been for tweeting the trial, and we interviewed them for more in-depth stories after the court case.
Those are good stories and helpful tips. I hope you can help with more stories and tips.
During the 2008 elections, we had reporters and bloggers across the county at poll locations and campaign headquarters. Using text messaging (they didn’t all have smart phones) they would tweet updates to their Twitter accounts. I used the Twitter API to aggregate all the accounts onto one real time page of coverage on our site.
Doesn’t sound like a big deal now, but I didn’t see anyone else doing that kind of stuff back then, which is amazing since it was only 1.5 years ago.
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[…] commentsComments Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications is collecting tips on how journalists can use Twitter and real world examples of how Twitter has helped journalists in […]
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In late 2008/early 2009, we had some pretty harsh floods here in Western Washington (state). Myself and a handful of other journalists ended up using Publish 2 to aggregate all our (and others’) information about the floods on all our sites. My company saw a big traffic spike from the link sharing and it made us multiple times faster at posting breaking news than we would have managed without it.
It never would have happened, though, if we didn’t all know each other on Twitter (what’s weird is that, at that point, most of us had never met in person). The “project” came together organically, in about an hour (if that) via Tweets.
Publish 2 has a more in-depth look at the situation on their blog, as does journalism.co.uk.
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[…] Steve Buttry. Steve Buttry is an adjunct journalism professor this semester at the UI. He is jointly teaching a class with the computer science department entitled “Creating and iPhone Application.” He also keeps a regularly updated blog about the Iowa City/surrounding area community. Journalism majors should check out this post. […]
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[…] I need journalists’ stories and tips on using Twitter (stevebuttry.wordpress.com) […]
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[…] include any Canadians, so first I asked for some examples of use by Canadian journalists. As I blogged last week, Bill Doskoch provided a fun example and someone else pointed me to trial coverage by […]
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