ReporTwitters Blog

This is the second profile of a reporTwitters.com member. Marilín Gonzalo (twitter, blog) is a rather active Twittering journalist from Argentina living in Madrid. She was involved in the web’s first Twitter-based newspaper, 20Palabras.com. This interview focuses in on that project.

-Marilín, Who are you professionally?
I’m an online journalist. I’ve done TV, radio and press, but since two years I’m focusing on internet content.

> -What did you study in school?
I have a degree in social communication and broadcasting.

> -What’s 20palabras and how long has it been going?
20palabras was an amazing journalism experiment based on communicating via Twitter. It started on August 2007 and went on during six months. It was the first time that a group of unknown-to-each-other scattered journalists in different cities sent their news over the internet and mobile phones to keep an up-to-date website with the latest information from the place where things were happening, without a centralized newsroom.

> -What news did the project cover mainly and why?
20palabras was the first Argentinian news website made entirely for mobile devices, thus it was focused mainly to an Argentinian audience. Its different sections covered an array of issues going from traffic jams in Buenos Aires to stock exchange fluctuations in Tokyo. Around 20 journalists could transmit their impression at the very moment they got the news, in just a few words (20 palabras means 20 words).

> -What was your role in it all?
Based in Madrid, I reported for the international news section.

> -Have you published tweets yourself alongside full length stories ever?
Of course, I tweet everyday since over a year now. I have found in Twitter a powerful tool for communication, on both sides, it’s a source of news, and it’s also a way to share a piece of data with the world. Maybe you don’t have the big scoop, but you have some useful info that completes the frame for the whole landscape. Maybe you just ring a bell, and that’s great, and when there are so many interesting people in here, the speed of it all is very interesting. Unfortunately, most of my jobs don’t allow tweeting, or somehow the information that you are giving out is controlled. But I think I would definitely Twitter all the time professionally if it was allowed.

> -How do you mainly interact with your Twitter audience?
I tweet a lot. Twitter has created a new impulse to write and to interact far more. I think we used to write blogs before, but our conversation was somehow slow, and lately not really interesting.
In my experience, people on Twitter point so many new issues out and not only subjects but opinions, meanings and clues about what’s happening, that it’s just not possible for me go one day without writing. And now I’m talking about my blog, cause when I want to resume, to gather information about something being heard/said, I go back to my blog and write about it.

> -What do you think the opportunities are for creating (an independent) Twitter service that newspapers would be interested in?
Everybody wants to be on Twitter. Twitter is the hype tool now, but what is more, Twitter has made us say things, communicate in a different way, making things shorter, quicker, more interesting.
Twitter is an amazing new tool but it’s not so easy to use it as a promotion channel as many communication agencies like to think. It can be really tricky if you think you can control what it’s said about something. There’s a huge amount of virality involved and you should really be experienced to make a good use of it.
There have been some attempts to create independent alike services to cover specific news or events, but they haven’t had major success. Maybe because the valuable thing in Twitter is not only the tool but also the community around it.

> -What do you think are good examples of Twitter supplemented reporting and why?

Twitter has proven to be *the* tool for conventions, big events and also mass media transmissions like TV programs or special outcomes. Twitter is great to serve as that backchannel, and here in Spain lately we had the experience during our last presidential elections. The two main candidates had a debate on TV, and the debate was so hot on twitter, with the comments of journalists, bloggers and the rest of twitterers from the blog community, that it really made a difference in the way that people, at least internet people, took part on the political debate. And that interest spread out in blogs and other websites.

> -How do you see Twitter/microblogged news reporting evolving?
I’ve always seen that direct link between twitter and journalism. So when they called me to be part of 20palabras.com staff it seemed so logic that it would work, now or in the future, that I said yes without hesitating. There was no business model at that moment, and we did it cause we just wanted to make it happen.
In those six months the project improved. We reached 20 thousand visitors, many suscribers and a lot of interested people. But unfortunately it didn’t get a valid business model and most of the staff were engaged in other projects. So we decided to stop it. 20 palabras showed the potential of a twitter-news-style for journalism. You have to understand that we did not simply relay headlines of news articles, but that we expressed the news itself in only 20 words.

> -Do you ever rely on Twitter for information?
Not completely of course. As a journalist, I always check the sources before publishing. Most of the big news issues recently I first read on Twitter. Twitter is especially useful as a complement with other tools, as blogs and media, but not as a standalone device.

Contact INFO @ reporTwitters.com if you want to be profiled as a Twittering reporter here too.