Tuesday, November 20, 2007

twitter San Diego public radio station KPBS did a great job of Twittering the CA wildfires -- and beyond.

A terrorist bomb kills dozens in your downtown. A tornado wipes out a nearby town. A school shooting leaves scores dead.

In the not-so-distant past, I would have urged you to create a breaking-news blog for your news site if any big story like those hit in your backyard. Reporters would be asked to send in brief reports with bits of news. Editors would look for tidbits from other sources to add to the fast-breaking blog. Readers would have a constant, fairly regularly updated account of new developments in the big story, as information surfaced. It would be a far cry from the old days of newspaper reporters assembling information to craft a story that, when ready, would go on the Web, in the print edition, on the TV newscast, or radio news.

That's so 2004! You can still do it, and probably should. But the breaking-news blog is about to be supplanted (or perhaps supplemented is a better word) by the Twitter breaking-news feed.

So here's what you do next time a BIG story hits: As you send your reporters out to cover the story, get them to post short bits of news (limited to 140 characters) to a Twitter feed that either you've set up for this story, or that you keep ready for significant breaking news. With reporters filing short bits from their cell phones, you'll be able to offer your audience new information even faster than you could with a breaking-news blog. "Rescue crews just pulled a body out from under the 12th Street Bridge." "Police are chasing an apparent suspect on foot near the downtown library."

Feed this to your site and to subscribed cell phone alerts. Urge your readers to "follow" your breaking-news Twitter stream from their own Twitter accounts.

I can hear some traditional-thinking editors scoffing. Fine, scoff away. But important news is getting out ever faster, and I'll contend that it's important to keep up, lest you be beaten by your Twittering competitors. (Excuse me, I believe the correct vernacular is "tweeting competitors.")

"Putting news up that fast is dangerous and will lead to inaccurate information being put out under our name," you say? OK, so add a cautionary warning that this is raw news coverage from your reporters, and early reports could be unverified. Make an effort to tweet updated information if an earlier report proves wrong.

I got the idea for this blog item from Marshall Kirkpatrick's blog item from last week, "Twitter is Paying My Rent," in which the new media consultant notes that he increasingly is learning about new tech news developments from friends' Twitter feeds -- before anyone has had a chance to blog about them, let alone write a full news story. He picked up Twitter rumblings about Google's acquisition of Jaiku before the news got out to the blogs, for example.

That should give reporters notice that Twitter is a potentially great source of news tips. And news organizations can speed up the news cycle by tweeting themselves on big stories as described above.

Twitter frivolous? Definitely not.

(Just to cover all the bases here, Twitter is one of several "presence" services available now. I discussed some of the others, including Jaiku, in this item on my personal blog earlier this week.)

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