ReporTwitters Blog

Harrisonburg is a small Virginia city with a population of less than 50,000. The town wasn’t exactly Happenstance until Brent Finnegan decided to liven things up by supplementing his alternative newsblog, Hburgnews.com, with a communal Twitter account. He called on his readers to text in news and soon he and his cronies outpaced the regular news media covering breaking news. This is an interview with Finnegan about his Twitter project.

-Brent, what’s your Twitter project about?

I decided to try a “Twitter experiment” on hburgnews.com early March after reading comments by new media blogger Jeff Jarvis about Twitter. I wasn’t sure how (or if) it was going to work. That’s why I called it an experiment. The basic idea was that I can’t possibly know everything that’s currently going on in the city and county. Individually, we all occasionally witness events like car accidents, fires, high wind damage, flooding, power outages, police raids, and other “breaking news” as it occurs. I thought the [Twitterized] sum of those eyewitness accounts could be very useful on a local news blog like hburgnews.com
I wasn’t sure how to harness the information, so I asked readers to register for a Twitter account specifically for hburgnews.com. I then used the newspaper blog’s Twitter account to follow participants. I took the “with friends” feed and embedded a flash badge on the newspaper blog.

-What have been major milestones?

Since implementing Twitter in March, there have been several Twitters that have prompted breaking news stories! Collectively, we were able to move that information much faster than the [competing] local media could keep up with.

-Has there been attention from the regular media?

I know that reporters from the three local media outlets are aware of the Twitter experiment, but I don’t think they are planning on implementing one themselves. We have one newspaper, one TV news station, and one AM radio station that covers local news.

-Can others replicate your system, should they be interested?

The beauty of utilizing Twitter on the news blog is that the readers can play an active role in reporting the news as they see it happen. It’s a huge leap in the evolution of citizen journalism.
The downside to the way we’re implementing Twitter is that Twitter is essentially set up for one user. With Gmail, you can set up as many accounts as you need for different purposes. If someone already has a personal Twitter account, they can’t use their cell phone for their hburg Twitter account. Other local Twitter users are currently excluded from the hburg Twitter because they also post non-news related content.