Why I have a Twitter account

I joined the social networking site Twitter more than a year ago. I read somewhere that Twitter was going to aggregate the tweets associated with the presidential election, and since we were all working that night, and we have the most pathetic excuse for a television in the newsroom, it made sense to be all places at once.

It worked marvelously. The feed picked up the latest and greatest results, people who were watching all the major news networks, informed me even as they learned, which states were going which way, which stations were calling which races, and all I had to do was sit back and watch.

But then I had no more use for Twitter. My account sat dormant for months, until the newspaper I work for announced it would be going live with a Twitter feed. Now that the paper was stepping into the social networking realm, albeit with the hesitance of a mouse unsure that that cat is truly sleeping, I decided to reenter and give it more effort.

Well, the effort came a bit slowly.

This article in American Journalism Review, "The Distribution Revolution," examines why the news industry is embracing Twitter, especially since its effect is hardly quantifiable.

One reason is we need to be able to get our work out there. You can't rely on Google for anything. Every day, the bots have more and more to search. Our newspaper's daily articles seldom catch the bots attention. In fact, they are searchable for such a short amount of time, the only time the articles really get picked up is when they are redistributed by other, more permanent, Web sites.


Yet, the newspaper I work for has not embraced this fully. The paper's Twitter account has what I would say is an impressive 162 followers, but does not follow anyone. In my opinion, the newspaper's twitter feed should have all the people in the community it can find. How will the paper take advantage of the rumblings of the community if its never listening?

In the American Journalism Review article, Robyn Tomlin, executive editor of the Wilmington Star-News, said the idea of Myreporter.com was birthed from a reader question, "Why is a helicopter flying around my house?"

What a great question. And who better to find the answer than someone whose job it is to find answers. And the night editor did know why and was able disseminate the information.



It makes me think of one Sunday at work. A reader called in and said something similar to me, but it sounded more like, "When are you going to put up on your Web site some information about what's going on? There are helicopters flying over my house dropping water."

I can't be everywhere at all times, and granted, it was fire season and I probably should have checked the fire logs earlier, but the reader tipped me off. Now if the newspaper had followed all the tweets of as many people as possible, would someone have tipped me off even earlier? It's hard to say, but its a mentality worth adopting.

The boss said he wants to go Web first, and wants to give readers a reason to look at our Web site at 6 p.m. instead of the nightly news (which isn't about us anyway.) But yet he's not making the push that could make that happen. Web first means distribution first. Competing means being the one-stop shop for news.

It's an interesting time to be a journalist, and I don't mind taking on more and more. We're getting a new Web site soon, and I, for one, am excited.

Admitting the inevitable

 A recent survey of newspaper editors found that most think newspapers will be free in the future. It seems logical considering that most breaking news is already free, and many people catch their headlines online, which is essentially free - except the initial investment of resources to access the Internet.

While newspapers in the print edition still come at a nominal cost, many people that I've talked to say, "Why would I pay for the paper when I can read it online for free?" And those papers that aren't producing interesting online content, or have Web sites that appear amateur, are certainly not earning themselves readers using online content. And think of how far a story online can travel and compare that to how much exposure it gets in a newspaper with 20,000 circulation.

While many online news consumers want their news as quickly as possible, that does not excuse journalists from fulfilling their primary function of being watchdogs for the public. It is discouraging to see that many editors responded they thought the quality of journalism will decline due to the emphasis on speed. Certainly both aspects of journalism can work together in this changing news environment. I believe that advances in information dissemination will lead to greater news-gathering abilities in less time. This is the perfect union of speed and investigation.

See Yahoo! news story here.