ReporTwitters Blog

Twittered live reporting is receiving a boost due to the US elections. Various newspapers are sending their reporters on the campaign trail who are supplementing their stories with tweets about significant developments and observations. Twitter is making inroads into some prestigious mainstream media.

Slate’s political reporter John Dickerson (formerly the Washington correspondent for Time magazine) is a point in case. His campaign trail tweets have attracted quite a bit of interest, both from fellow reporters and his readers. “It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room,” Dickerson is repeatedly quoted as commenting on his latest sojourn. And that’s right on. Dickerson’s tweets are published in the direct vicinity of his stories alongside the Google Twitter mashup map which is pre-set to exact trail locations. The whole package on one page is an example of how you get the best out of all the tools available. Not only do readers have the experience they’re in a room with the reporter, they really are being dragged from place to place with him. And that’s what journalism should be all about.

If more news media take to publishing Tweets as additional information to articles, it will help them build relationships with audiences. Also, it will standardize the reporter tweets and make journalistic twittering stand out from the crowd. Unlike with journalists’ Facebook participation, most reporters have yet to distinguish between personal and professional twittering. Little or no interest by employers often means that the tweets sink into oblivion. That is a total shame, both for the media and the reporters themselves. The news is by nature a business that has people’s attention and to get additional insights from the reporter’s personal perspective in many cases adds an unusual but ever so real feel.

The renewed Twitter hype, if anything, has underscored that an existence as a roving reporter has not lost all its glamorous lore due to the masses’ catching on to the journalistic buzz factor.

Time.com’s Ana Marie Cox’ tweets are a terrific example of this. They are a mix of hard nosed journalism, brilliant wit and humoristic insights. Read the tweet on the picture upside down if you want to grasp the moment by moment sequence;

Time does not publish the tweets next to Cox’ stories I get the impression but it list links to the Tweet and to a Flickr account.

That’s very similar to the way the BBC’s Ben Hammersley reported on the Turkish elections last year. That was an interesting experiment, but I bet you had a Tweet been embedded into the BBC news pages, Hammersley would have been still at it. If you look at his Tweet now, you can see that it’s been months since he last updated. Hammersley’s own web presence strongly testifies of the Twitter spirit though. He has managed to incorporate all the right channels on one page, which gives you a razor sharp idea of what this roving reporter is doing right now, what his live broadcasts are (going to be), who his friends are and what his professional opinions are. It is yet another example of what being online and professional is all about.