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Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News
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I can top that!
Posted by Alex Dering 11/7/2009 6:32:17 PM

Tom Traubert: And then you get into the absolute worst of ALL possible worlds, twits tweeting what they are watching on CNN!

Sorry, Tom. I can top that. Right now, Yahoo has an, um, article about "the best way to eat chicken wings."

Tweeting CNN
Posted by Tom Traubert 11/7/2009 10:41:23 AM

And then you get into the absolute worst of ALL possible worlds, twits tweeting what they are watching on CNN!

Let's not dump exclusively on Twitter either. The news web sites like New York Times were "live-blogging" the Fort Hood event. And how were they "live-blogging"? They were watching CNN and monitoring Twitter, and "live-blogging" THAT. So the New York Times blog The Lede was watching CNN in their studio and monitoring Twitter, and repeating all that disinformation and speculation in time-stamped posting on their website.

You know, yes, people DO want information immediately and in quantity in breaking news situations. but, SOMETIMES THAT INFORMATION ISN'T YET AVAILABLE! Responsible news organizations shouldn't fill that void with a bunch of garbage and misinformation just to fill it.

And they shouldn't sit back in a self-satisfied glow because they used a cool new toy to do it.

Twitter = Redundant
Posted by Alex Dering 11/7/2009 10:21:21 AM

the police department was not confirming any deaths, while the fire department was. Who do you go with in such a situation?

Report something like "Police and fire officials are giving contradictory statements on whether the suspect is still alive. We'll update as soon as we can."

The idea that any reporter would wait "an hour or two" for a PIO is not very likely in this scenario. I don't think that a news outlet that sticks to facts is risking a "hit to their credibility" because they took longer to get the story right the first time. I think it's the opposite.

Next, a question about the usefulness of Twitter. The suspect's description, his car, and various street and highway closings.

Did the suspect leave the base? No. So his car description served no purpose. If he HAD left the base, what use is his car info? "I just got an unconfirmed tweet that he's driving a white Toyota Celica!" (The suspect could have stolen someone else's car.) "Omigod! There's a Celica! Oh, wait, it's a 70-year-old woman driving. Omigod! There's another Celica!"

As for the highway closings. Yes, those are useful to know about. So are the highway alert signs and the radio in my car that has 1610 AM for official highway closing info. Cause of accident: I was scrolling through all my tweets to see if the highway was still open when I rear-ended a white Toyota Celica."

Twitter doesn't get "a lot of flak simply because it's new and trendy and people are still figuring it out." Yes, that's part of it, but the big part of it is that most of Twitter's "functionality" is redundant. Add to that how (as someone else pointed out) the stream of tweets can quickly flood with ramblings, and it is probably even LESS useful than what it is attempting to surplant.

Tweets -- as records from the victims of things like the WTC collapse and Hurricane Katrina -- would be invaluable, after the events, after confirmation of which tweets were legitimate. But in near-real time? Naah.

The initial event
Posted by Tom Traubert 11/7/2009 10:19:41 AM

As in many of the breaking news events since its emergence, Twitter is only useful to inform people about the initial event. The first five minutes, ten minutes of a breaking news story. "Wow, I just saw an airplane go down in the Hudson River" "Wow, now people are standing out on the wing" "Wow, the rescue boats are already there!" After that, the quality of information on Twitter deteriorates by orders of negative magnitude into a morass of disinformation, rumors, irrelevant gasping, handwringing, opinion, political statements, quips, and barbs.

Of course, we get much the same garbage with CNN so that isn't really an improvement. Usually local broadcasts are the best sources of breaking news for situations like that. Yes, they often fall short, but they are generally much more accountable for their mistakes than CNN and devices like Twitter, where people who followed the Fort Hood shootings were the most misinformed news consumers of the day. (I can't speak to the Orlando shootings.)

Add the fact the the majority of people aren't ON Twitter. Many workplaces block Twitter at their workplace. Most people don't have mobile devices that ping on every tweet. So in the enthusiasm for this cool new toy called Twitter, please know that you are NOT reaching the vast majority of news consumers by using it. You only imagine that you are.

Twitter during the Orlando shootings
Posted by Caitlin Kuleci Constantine 11/7/2009 9:24:59 AM

While I obviously agree that accuracy is the most important thing and that sometimes it gets lost in an effort to get the story out there, I think the criticism fails to take into consideration that people WANT to know when something like this happens, but that a situation like this is so chaotic that not even the sources who would be in a position to provide confirmation of information are in a position to do so.

Example: Yesterday during the Orlando high-rise shooting, the police department was not confirming any deaths, while the fire department was. Who do you go with in such a situation?

Our - the news world and the public's - expectations are so changed now that any outlet that sits and waits an hour or two until they can get a PIO who is in a position to confirm anything is going to take a hit to their credibility, just as they would for reporting inaccurate information.

I think that we and other news organizations used Twitter effectively yesterday during the Orlando shooting (which is the event I can speak about with a bit more authority, as a web journalist who was close to the affected area) when it came to getting out information about the suspect, his description, his car and the various street and highway closings. That is all information that has very practical, useful applications for the public. But it wasn't as if we just put it all out there on Twitter - it was just one of several tools we used. We had live broadcast, we had a DEKO crawl, we had our web site, and we would have had SMS alerts had the system not broken down on us. Twitter isn't really all that different from email or even the phone, but it gets a lot of flak simply because it's new and trendy and people are still figuring it out.

Almost all of the initial reports were wrong
Posted by Tom Traubert 11/7/2009 7:34:18 AM

So what was the point? To have a stream of breathless information, comment, opinion, speculation in 140-ch snarkbytes? Just about every meaningful item of news -- who was the shooter, how many shooters, is he(are they) alive, how many victims -- was completely, wrongly fed in a breathless stream along with the opinions and feelings of some tech guy out in California and some stay-at-home mother sipping latte in Minnesota, jokes, way-out political opinions and handwringing.

What's the value of that? "Information" for information's sake, no matter how wrong? It seems as though everyone who followed Twitter for this event turned out far more MISinformed than anyone else. We already get that kind of breathless speculation and misinformation on CNN.

I prefer to wait an hour for responsible journalism which took the time to CONFIRM what is reported. It has no impact on my life as a news consumer of a "breaking" event to wait 30 minutes or an hour for reliable information.

Twitter is a neat toy. But don't take is seriously as a news venue. It's as unreliable a CNN or your gossipy neighbor over the back fence as news material.

Thanks
Posted by Alex Dering 11/6/2009 2:37:05 PM

You mentioned something I thought of about two minutes after I hit send.

Newspaper websites are -- by definition -- going to have unpredictable spikes in viewership.

Why then are newspaper sites not prepared for those spikes? Why are these sites crashing to begin with? It's been a decade since the Internet took off, at least. Why are sites not server balanced?

Ft Hood
Posted by jackie stone 11/6/2009 1:39:50 PM

I have been tweeting @kdhnews during this event

early on the killeen daily herald's web site buckled under so many viewers (as did many others) and twitter was the best way for us to get information out

Please explain ...
Posted by Alex Dering 11/6/2009 12:37:33 PM

1. How the use of Twitter was necessary. In what way did Twitter offer anything that could not have been done by simply putting up a Breaking News section on the newspaper's website?

2. How is a series of 140-character tweets superlative in this sort of situation? Don't the tweets need to be checked? Confirmed? Are the tweets why the soldier was first reported killed and later reported as captured, thus merely adding to the confusion and panic?

3. Why invoke new technology -- especially tech with marginal market penetration -- in the middle of a crisis? Can you imagine the 50-year-old mothers scrambling to figure out Twitter in the midst of wondering whether their children have just been murdered? Oh, and don't forget the e-mail and your facebook page, moms. Better start checking those. And keep one eye on the TV. And don't tell me you don't have a radio. Go start the car up and crank the volume on that, too.

Or am I too Old School?

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