It’s Time for Journalists to Learn Twitter?

A blog post with the title of Why Journalists Should Use Twitter caught my eyes when I was surfing the web for new trends in the field of journalism on 18 January. The article was written by Nico Luchsinger, a freelance journalist who often writes for Swiss newspapers. I could not but feel that I lagged behind in following up cutting-edge technologies for journalists. It was only less than a month ago that I came to know from a Time magazine article exactly what Twitter is, but other journalists are already talking about applying it to reporting.

Twitter is usually called a micro-blogging service. Its users send very short texts, up to 140 characters, via mobile phone’s SMS or computer’s instant messaging services to the Twitter website. These texts are instantly delivered through SMS, RSS or email to their family, friends, or colleagues who have signed up to receive them. The brief messages are called “Updates” because they are the answers to the same question, What Are You Doing? The examples are “Eating soup” “Running late to a meeting” “Partying” and etc. Using Twitter, people can stay connected with others through the exchange of their current whereabouts.

How can such short messages become a journalistic medium? Nico said “if you play around a little bit with Twitter, you will very quickly realise that there is a huge potential for journalists and media companies.” His praise for Twitter focused on four characteristics of the new network service.

(1) Quickest way to break news
He said that Twitter is a great way of breaking news very quickly and easily. Twitter’s mobile notification service makes it perfect for this kind of service, and its open API guarantees that the information can be fed into the service at very low cost. CNN is already doing it. Have a look at http://twitter.com/cnnbrk for recent stories broken by CNN toward Twitter users. The stories consist of only a sentence with less than 140 characters, for example, Sen. Hillary Clinton will win the New Hampshire primary after a tight race with Sen. Barack Obama, Nico also picked San Diego’s TV station KBPS as a good example of breaking news through Twitter. The broadcaster brilliantly used Twitter to keep the population informed when its website crashed during the wildfires last October.

Twitter can be an effective tool for citizen journalism. When Iowa held its caucuses for the US presidential elections on January 3rd, political strategist Patrick Ruffini asked people participating in the caucuses to send him the results directly via Twitter. Ruffini in turn then aggregated the results and re-distributed them on a Twitter channel he had set up specifically for the Iowa caucuses. He commented on this experience: “This exercise in citizen journalism foretold the result far more quickly than dispatching two dozen stringers to caucus locations throughout Iowa.”

(2) Connecting with readers
On a more personal level, Twitter can be a great way for journalists to connect with their readers. A German blogger and reporter Thomas Knuewer’s experience is introduced in Nico’s article. Thomas said: “One day, when I was researching an article, I was looking for a specific piece of information, I just asked the question on Twitter - and had the answer I was looking for within minutes.” Knuewer then began asking his Twitter followers for questions before he did an interview. “For each interview, I got about 5 to 10 questions from people over Twitter. That’s actually quite an impressive number if you consider that I have about 300 people following me.”

(3) Aggregating data
Twitter can be used for a quick poll or census. Thanks to staying connected with people all the time, a user can ask anything to the others at any time. There are several sites that allow you to directly poll the Twitter userbase, for example Twittpoll and Twittercensus.

(4) It’s free
The great thing about Twitter is that it’s completely free. This has allowed the service to grow very quickly over the last year or so. It is now estimated to have 866,000 users.

Anyway, if Twitter firmly puts down roots in the media industry as one of journalistic platforms, we have to struggle again to develop a new news format that best fits the 140-character-long space.