Newspapers appear to have finally have noticed that Twitter is a useful tool. Sadly, it took the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province for the message to hit home. The BBC and Reuters have put developers on creating an alert system scanning Twitter and other social-media such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook for breaking news items, much the same way as anyone can do (read this reporTwitters blogpost for hints).
What’s interesting however is that both Reuters and the BBC not only want to get the news alerts first but also plan to get access to witnesses’ tweets, photos and videos. I am still busy finding out how they’re setting it up but would guess that they have trained journalists dedicated to Twitter.
Most other media can be described as having just woken up to Twitter. Their hype over Twitter’s use as a reporting device is still pretty much just that; mere hype. In the past days editors have gone haywire over the medium that’s faster than they themselves as well as the official seismic agency, but it’s unclear if they’re getting in on the game directly themselves. Virtually none of the established papers tapped into direct Chinese earthquake information that they said was so readily available. Only a few one- off Tweets were included in newspaper reports featuring social media content about the earthquake.
The decision to adopt Twitter in newspaper coverage tends to mimick the very same processes as you see elsewhere; people exhibit an interest in Twitter, leave it for a while and then become major addicts. Those editors that have made it to stage three tend to be totally crazy about the tool.
Good examples of a converts are BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker and Guardian journalist Charles Arthur. Baker makes the point that despite ‘all the drivel’ on Twitter, what’s making it a powerhouse of proportion is first and foremost the fact that its user base;has been exploding recently.
“The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here’s why I’m looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers”,
writes Baker. That’s very true; Web analytics company Compete reported that Twitter’s traffic virtually doubled between February and April to almost 1.2 million users. What’s more important is that the visitors’ time spent on Twitter quadrupled during that month.
Unlike Business Week and Google’s earlier complaints about blogging’s diminished use for editors because there are so many of them, Baker says the sheer numbers game is to Twitter’s advantage. Why? Well, you get instant replies to any question asked! Baker asked his readers some questions concerning using Twitter, including
“Should we all be Twittering?”
He got over 200 replies within seconds. Any reporter would agree that that’s invaluable.
The Guardian has also definitely woken up to Twitter’s true potential and is well into relaying social media content. The paper has been raving about Twitter’s use in the Chinese earthquake, underlining that the
“service has proved its worth: the earthquake in China was, it’s claimed,
on Twitter before it was on the US Geological service’.
What’s more, the paper recently published a guide for
those ’scrathing [their] head’ (ie us here at ReporTwitters) outlining the benefits of Twitter. Charles Arthur says
“The applicability of Twittering to doing pretty much anything - which certainly includes reporting - is very interesting. The other day I was thinking that the first big news event where we talked about “the internet” being first to transmit the news was the Kobe
earthquake of January 1995. Many people say that blogs were preeminent after the terrorist attacks of September11. Then of course mobiles used for video (and Flickr photos) came into their own during the July7 bombings in London. Maybe this has been Twitter’s media proving. (Also, what events have we missed out where mobiles or the web proved themselves?)”
Reporters at Venturebeat.com not only use the medium one way (posting its news items on a Twitter account like most news organizations do) but publishs their Tweets in their publication, exemplifying Twitter’s use in fast paced journalism;
In an article
assessing just how mainstream Twitter is, Venture Beat’s MG Siegler says
“We’ve seen this before. Last year, several smaller earthquakes were reported first on TwitterThe mainstream media largely ignored this fact, but it happened nonetheless. Now, with so many people thinking about
Twitter valuations, and whining about Twitter not being mainstream, the service is starting to garner attention for the wrong reasons. At the end of the day, what difference does it make if it’s mainstream or not? It’s very useful for situations like this, and it’s actually helping people. We saw that during the San Diego fires last year as well.”
That comment is great because of course it’s all about the information itself and not about Twitter. Which could however do with the staunch backing of existing information networks as embodied in the news media. That point is underscored by Mr Siegler shortly afterwards, when he publishes an obligatory
complaints letter to Twitter for service downtime, published in the San Francisco Industry Standard.
It will be interesting to see where it all goes. In many ways we’ve completed a circle, and news authorities are thinking hard and deep about the implications of citizen reporting.
Jeff Jarvis pointed out in the Media
Guardian where the game is at, saying “Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coalmine”, when referring to the Reuters and BBC initiatives to develop tools for scanning social media.
One big question is whether leaving portions of news gathering in the hands of random individuals is a good idea. News coverage might be no longer about
“waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over”,
as Jarvis says, but about the random people close to the scene who
“will still go and do what journalists do: report,
verify facts, package, and take their own pictures.”
Scientist magazine Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Leysia Palen, into the use of social networks during the California wildfires last October and the Virginia Tech shootings last April.
Palen concluded that
“Instead of rumour-mongering, we see socially produced accuracy.”
And she added that
“Members of the public play an absolutely critical role in disaster response.”
The study was damaging for the established media, pointing out
inaccuracy and distortions.
“The mass media were furthermore deemed unreliable because they had no access to remote areas from which website users with an internet connection were reporting and took to reporting on the sensational issues, such as fires close to celebrities’ homes. Now we’re seeing what happens when you superimpose a technological layer on top of that,”
Palen said. Ouch. It’s only one study of course and I would imagine that there’s plenty of scope for opposing material, but nevertheless.
Palen’s article in New Scientist had the invigorating headline “Emergency 2.0 is coming to you”. That very phrase ‘emergency 2.0′ sounds just right. Perhaps the only thing that a clever media outlet needs to do is to capitalize on an already existing capacity, ie people’s urge to report emergencies. Create a site for just emergencies and build on the self organization.
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