By:
August 1, 2013

For a moment on Tuesday, I thought the biggest news of the year had broken when a newsroom colleague turned to me wide-eyed and announced: “Manning acquitted.”

The adrenaline subsided seconds later when we saw the fuller context: Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge against him — aiding the enemy — for providing secret documents to WikiLeaks, but he was convicted on many other counts and could still spend his life in prison.

That critical conjunction — “but” — was missing in the majority of breaking-news tweets, hence my brief confusion.

Journalists weren’t wrong per se. This tweet by the Washington Post, for example, was factually correct:

But it didn’t tell the full story, and, with its all-caps “NOT GUILTY” could have given readers the impression that it was all good news for Manning. Here’s how a few other large U.S. newspapers first tweeted the verdict:

 

 

 

Of these, the Los Angeles Times came closest to suggesting the acquittal wasn’t all there was to the story by alluding to the existence of other charges. And less than a minute later, it added another tweet saying Manning will still face a lengthy prison sentence. The Wall Street Journal tweeted details about Manning being found guilty on lesser offenses about 20 minutes after its first tweet, and USA Today did so about 10 minutes later.

My favorite tweets from that 25-minute window were by those unafraid to use a conjunction or a comma and come a little closer to that 140-character limit:

 

 

 

Any tweet could be someone’s first opportunity to hear a piece of news, so those news outlets that embraced completeness over succinctness served their readers best. Given criticism that the mainstream media didn’t cover the Manning trial enough, readers easily could have been confused by tweets lacking context.

Meanwhile, newspapers’ front pages on Wednesday also reflected the difficulties of the verdict. Was it good news for Manning and those who saw his leaks as valuable whistleblowing? Bad news? Mixed?

Most of the top-10 newspapers used the acquittal in their main headlines, explaining that he was still found guilty of espionage in their decks. A notable outlier was the Denver Post, with its “Verdict could mean life” headline.

Denver Post front page.

My favorite headline from the day? The Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times, which eschewed the generic and managed to get at both sides of the story in a tight space: “Not a traitor, but many times guilty.”

Tampa Bay Times cover.

 

The goals of tweeting breaking news and writing news headlines are similar: be accurate, be complete and be concise. With a breaking-news tweet you have less time to be mindful of the subtle ways it might be misconstrued. While you can quickly post a follow-up tweet, you don’t have the benefit of a deck below, but you often have more room than you’d get in a newspaper headline. There are enough characters there to provide nuance. Let’s use them.

(Full disclosure: I interned at Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times in summer 2012. I currently work as a digital editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. Follow me on Twitter here.)

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Sam Kirkland
Sam Kirkland is Poynter's digital media fellow, focusing on mobile and social media trends. Previously, he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a digital editor,…
Sam Kirkland

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