ReporTwitters Blog

So how useful is Twitter for reporting? Can you find an on the spot Twitter user within seconds on just about ANY news event? The answer is a definite yes. More and more Twitter sourced scoops are hitting the news headlines and Twitter is even useful for covering the Cuban leadership changeover.

For the standard routine news story, you should consider searching Twitter of equal value to your hottest source whose only drawback is that they’re tend to be immensely busy all the time. When a big story breaks, you try to reach them always even though you wouldn’t place all your bets on them. Twitter is of similar importance for reporting hard, fast paced news.

These are some examples of Twitter-sourced (near) scoops;

Insider Coverage
The Yahoo layoff Twitter report by Ryan Kuder. He is an employee who was made redundant and his Tweet was picked up in its entirety by SearchEngineLand and ZDNet blogs. Various other sites picked up from them.

Kuder’s tweet is a perfect example of a classic scoop. News media love this! If you ever are in a similar situation and have the presence of mind to Twitter, contact us at reporTwitters to get you the right exposure in the media.

Twitter’s potential in extreme situations
Today’s world headline news of the leadership change in Cuba is a topic that is not Twittered about by Cubans, because this country is more or less cut off from the web. But searching Twitter (on Twitterment and TwitterSearch, for more sources, see our ultimate Twitter guide page) nevertheless landed me with great material from people close to the action. These are some TwitterSearch results:

There are two potential sources; one is a Cuban blogger, the other a Canadian guy that happened to have visited Cuba last week. The blogger lives in Havana and her posts are very insightful. She contributes to ObserversFrance.com, a site which runs a gem of an article entitled Students openly criticise the Cuban government. It’s linked to a video with protesting students in the Cuban Parliament taped on 19 January. That is just brilliant material, especially compared to the Google results;

Even though Google News ranks the Cuba story as the number 1 news story today, the news coverage is rather meagre; a Digg search yields only one recent Cuba story and it’s digged 6 times only. Searching Technorati shows no direct Cuban bloggers are available.

Obviously the media is not getting the personal angle on this story that we might be developing. What’s more; the Twitter sources are rather accessible. We can send thema direct Twitter message and the Twittersearch sources are even on Facebook!

The result on the other Twitter search engine, Twitterment.com is pictured below and is also a gem;

Twittering About Your Scoop
The third example is a near scoop by a UK environmental journalist and Twitter user who went on the trail of a blogger to comment on the floods in Bolivia. The Tweet was spotted by OnlineJournalismBlog in an article entitled Why Twitter? A Visual Demonstration. Check out how it went on from there (and other journalistic activities) on this Twitterer’s tweet. It’s another example of the power of Twitter.

These three Twitter-sourced (near) scoops all show that if you manage to get search results on Twitter, the chances that you’ve hit the inside story or a scoop are higher than when you performed the search on Google News or even Technorati or Google Blogs. Keep that in mind.