Just when professors at the journalism school were getting used to blogging, the students at Columbia University wanted to cover a presidential forum via "tweets."
These messages, no longer than 140 characters each, are published on a platform called Twitter. (It's also been described as a micro-blog). The basic idea is to share information with your followers, such as:
- "Ezra Klein says the incentive system journalists have for candidates is partly responsible for McCain's turn to falsehoods." -- Jay Rosen, professor at New York University
- "Tore myself away from my new mac so I could take a yoga class. Now feeling creative AND flexible." -- Anna Frenkel from New York
- "Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have agreed a power sharing deal, sources tell CNN." -- CNN
When Columbia announced the visit of Barack Obama and John McCain to participate in a forum on national service, a group of new media students
set up a blog to cover it. The blog would cover the event from every angle and integrate popular photo sharing tools such as
Flickr and
Picasa (scroll past the first item on the page to see each of these slide shows) and
Mogulus to add a live video feed.
At first, the editors had students calling the newsroom and would publish their reporting
in individual blog posts. "But we lost something in the translation," said
Alan Haburchak. "If the reporter can
instantly report what he is seeing, I think it adds some immediacy to the coverage."
That's where Twitter came in. Editors of the blog agreed that Twitter enhanced coverage of the forum.
"Leading up to the events, our best up-to-the-minute coverage came from people seeing things online or on TV and texting them to their Twitter accounts, which is much faster than us going to our computers and blogging," said Heather Grossmann, one of the editors of the blog. She said Twitter forced students to do more focused, pointed reporting because of its limit to 140 characters.
Leading up to the event, most of the reporters' work, such as audio slide shows and written observations, was posted directly to the blog. A box on the lower part of the page contained a few of the most recent tweets.
But once the actual forum started, Twitter became more important. With only cell phones allowed inside the auditorium, one of the students,
Chikodi Chima, relied on Twitter to report. The editors, realizing that Twitter offered information that wasn't available through the video stream, decided to move the box of recent tweets higher on the blog to give it more prominence.
Chima said he used Twitter to catch and transmit little moments in time. "With Twitter, you can
capture a moment that the TV cameras were not focused on, or that wasn't part of the bigger story. It is just color that somebody following live might be interested in. It broadens the scope of what the story is."
Yet there were challenges in reporting with Twitter. Having no editor and only a limited amount of space sometimes
led to a writing style that would be considered inappropriate in any other format at the journalism school. At times, it was hard to decide on the spot whether a piece of information had enough value for a tweet. With real-time coverage comes greater responsibility.
"Signing up and Twittering does not equal good reporting," said
Collin Crowell, who was part of the group that set up the blog and has used Twitter for almost a year. "Students need to take the time to understand how each application can improve journalism."
This was the first time j-school students used Twitter in this collaborative fashion. The next time, Crowell said, contributors will need a Twitter style guide. That way students will tweet in a consistent style with a common understanding of when and how to use it.
The dean of student affairs for the journalism school,
Sree Sreenivasan, said Twitter added to the conversation about the forum and made it more alive.
"This particular project had the elements which make Twitter use appropriate: fast-moving action, live coverage and interest from far away," Sreenivasan said in an e-mail. "Twitter is something we are all figuring out and it was great to see the students implementing it on their own."
"What we are teaching," he said, "is a new media skill set, but also a new media mindset."
For Duy Linh Tu, the new media coordinator for the journalism school, Twitter is just another reporting tool -- but with most of the technologies these days, people forget the reporting aspect. "We don't worry about column inches, we worry about good stories. There is no fixed rule anymore," Tu said. "A good story can be 25 words, a good story can be five photos, but it all comes down to the reporting, which will never change."
Franz Strasser is studying broadcast at Columbia's journalism school. You can follow his tweets at twitter.com/franzstrasser.The photo for this story was taken by Joseph C. Lin, who is studying new media at Columbia's journalism school. twitter seems to be the fastest way to communicating, it...
