After my earlier post on how Twitter worked out during the first day of the Chinese earthquake, a Danish journalism student asked me to explain how journalists could use Twitter. That was pretty easy, partly because some of my Poynter colleagues have offered rather thorough advice on Twitter.
The student responded with a depressed-sounding e-mail. He’d asked around, but none of his colleagues used Twitter. Most hadn’t even heard of the service. I wasn’t surprised. If I may generalize, most journalists tend to be rather conservative about adopting new ways for exploring news.
So I gave this students one of my journalistic trade secrets: Do not tell your journalism colleagues about Twitter! Keep it as your own secret tool.
When I first came to China as a foreign correspondent, I worked for a Dutch transportation newspaper. Later, when the Internet became available in China in the late 1990s, I found I could cover all of Asia for this paper without leaving my office. When I paid my employer a courtesy visit at their offices in Rotterdam, I told them about the emergence of the Internet. They proudly proclaimed that they had been able, with the help of the trade union, to keep the Internet out of the editorial process. The Internet was no tool for journalists, they claimed.
I knew enough to shut up and kept covering (with the help of the Internet) Asian logistics for another two years — until editorial resistance against the Internet failed. It took them a few months to learn that that what I did from Shanghai, they could now do just as well from Rotterdam. That spelled the unavoidable end of this gig — but because I kept my mouth shut, it lasted much longer than I’d expected.
So instead of seeing journalistic conservatism about online media as a problem, try viewing it as your competitive edge.
