You can’t get scooped because competition gets tipped to a story when you tweet about it. Your tweets already scooped the competition.
A Digital First engagement editor who’s been teaching colleagues how to use Twitter got these questions from a veteran reporter:
Thank you for helping me understand Twitter and how to use it. What I don’t get is: If we tweet where we are and what we’re doing, how do we keep the competition from making a few phone calls on a story we sat through a meeting to sift out and develop? Or they’re not at the fire, but I’m tweeting and now they know.
And if I give results on Twitter, why would they buy a paper to see the results of the game?
I thought Twitter was to draw readers to our paper. So this is a struggle.
This is classic print-centric thinking. The newspaper has an early print deadline so “they’ve been scooped a lot,” the engagement editor told me. In this kind of thinking, scoops are based on who has the print story first.
That’s not how Digital First journalists and newsrooms think. If we had the story first, we had the scoop. And you have the story first if you have it on Twitter and/or on your website. (more…)
The Buttry Diary 