As part of my family’s holiday break, we went to Disney World. It’s such a fun place and in my continuing quest to be the nerdiest possible parent, I wanted to try some different ways to document our trip. I decided to try out the citizen journalism-eque Twisney.com site. It’s Twitter for Disney fans… and actually you can use Twitter to post to Twisney.
I decided to give it a try by sending tweets (by adding @twisney to my tweets on Twitter) and emailing photos to the site (twisney@twisney.com). For some reason I was the only person at Disney World using Twisney so it turned into a big Reeves Family adventure on the front page of the website. You can visit our posts from here or if you go to the main site for now, our last 30 Twisney posts show up on the front of Twisney.com. I think there are some very creative ways we could use this kind of technology for something more news-worthy. When photos show up on the Twisney map, they also go to Twisney’s Flickr page. It was easy and quick to use and could be a handy concept during breaking news or a big news event (like a massive rally or sporting event). I realize my family thinks I’m a huge nerd for using Twisney, but it was fun to give it a try!
By the way, Twisney was put together by a Disney fan named Scott Mitchell who is from Naples, Florida (at least that’s where he lived when he registered the domain). The site got a bunch of buzz back in the Spring and Summer… and clearly the thrill is wearing off. Fewer people are using it. But it’s a fantastic project. It got some props back in May if you’re interested in reading a bit about it from the Wall Street Journal.
I’ve talked about social media here and in many different presentations at the Missouri School of Journalism, conferences and training seminars. I feel like all of my ramblings are a little more legitimate as more and more journalists debate on whether these trends are good or bad. Obviously I plant myself into the camp that this is good.
Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Twitter lately… Heck, a lot of my posts have been about Twitter since I started this nerd blog. But I have to say, Twitter came into its own this week due to the tragedy in Mumbai. It’s been a major focus since the attacks started Wednesday and many media outlets have noticed.
(@tweetip followed the first tweets on the Mumbai attacks)
It’s fascinating to see how people flocked to share information onto Twitter and then watch how some of the more mainstream media tried to explain it. Amy Gahran (who is a consultant and works at Poynter) was kind to speak to a number of these media outlets to explain how information needs to be filtered. She tried to explain how social media is a news source and not an evil threat. Unfortunately, some outlets hear that call, others continue to play to the culture of fear. (Note the title of the ABC news article) She wrote a great piece for Poynter on how to be a responsible tweeter.
In reading the many articles online and watching the conversations on Twitter, I’ve come to a couple conclusions on why Twitter can be a wonderful news source for all of us to use during developing news. First, you can’t understand or rely on information from Twitter without becoming a part of the Twitter community. It’s very hard to trust or understand the information found on there unless you’ve been there long enough to build a community and a reliable chunk of people you follow. I knew about Sarah Palin’s nomination hours before it went puplic. My husband thought I was crazy to bring it up. I knew about the earthquake in China and the kind of damage it was causing before there were full accounts on the international media outlets. I knew about developments of smaller stories across the country because I follow people I trust and I’ve spent enough time following them that I knew what they are experts in. If a mom blogger suddenly started tweeting with financial tips, I would question that information unless she happens to be a day trader and a mom blogger (it can happen).
Second, I consider Twitter like how I work with scanners in a newsroom. When there is scanner squawk during breaking news (such as the #Mumbai hashtag) often it’s correct information… but you have to consider the source and confirm it. Twitter can be more reliable considering if you’ve been there a while you already know your sources, background and reliability. When there’s breaking news, you can follow it through a hashtag but confirm and do follow up with the people you follow.
I am visiting my in-laws for the holidays when I happened to hop onto Twitter this afternoon. That’s when I discovered the horrible news about an attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, India. But as I continued to watch the chatter on Twitter, the situation got worse. More attacks at the Taj Hotel and word attackers were taking people with passports from the US and the UK. Talk of grenade attacks and suddenly a list of people who were in Mumbai emerged. It was amazing to suddenly find people who were in the city give their perspective. I was almost immediately hooked to the Twitter search page where people were using the #mumbai tag with updates on the situation. At some points thousands of new posts would appear in a matter of seconds.
The most fascinating information emerging came from a Twitter user named Vinu. CNN reports his full name is Vinukumar Ranganathan. He had seen the damage first-hand. Many of the explosions happened a couple of blocks from his home. Along with his tweets, he started to upload dozens of photos he took while he was outside. While I read his writing and looked at his pictures, I noticed him comment that CNN had seen his tweets and wanted to talk to him on the air. His phone interview and his photos emerged on that network. His photos can be found online interspersed with AP and Getty Images on CNN.com. CNN started actively recruiting first-hand information through social networks and I suddenly realized the social network of news is going mainstream. It’s fascinating.
While I was having this awesome social media moment, a family member talked to me skeptically about how it was possible I could know so much about what was happening without following a “real” news source. I feel I was getting better and more accurate information following Twitter than anywhere else. Many of the facts I learned emerged 10 minutes, even an hour later through CNN or other outlets. Along with the Twitter feed, a help blog emerged and a wiki that was keeping up with the developments very closely. You can even follow Twitter real-time and within a 15 mile radius of Mumbai. It’s incredible how the world can combine to deliver awesome information.
UPDATE: A nice list of social networks used during this developing story can be found on Poynter’s website and here.
My friend and member of the Reynolds Journalism Institute futures lab staff and newscast director extraordinaire Travis McMillen created this quick look at what you may have missed if you weren’t watching the Smart Decision ‘08 webcast.
The end of the 2008 election season wrapped up a piece of my online obsession - SmartDecision08.com. Along with helping keep that site running with content from KOMU.com, KBIA.org and the ColumbiaMissourian.com I also decided to turn the partnership up a notch and produce a multi-newsroom webcast. We ended up also including a new internationally-focused newsroom called Newsy.com into the webcast as well. So for four hours we worked with content from four newsrooms and conducted interviews with participants in a big non-partisan watch party we created to coincide with the webcast. It was pretty fantastic to be able to combine multiple newsrooms AND the community all into one event. I’m proud of the dozens and dozens of people who helped make the event happen. I’m exhausted from it all still.
I actually had to run out of town the very next day for family reasons so I haven’t been able to truly digest the many things we were able to do since SmartDecision08.com launched a year ago. I don’t want to see the site die - so I have to come up with ways to let it continue to grow even without any funding. The great thing about RSS feeds is the content continues to flow, so I’m trying to conceptualize a way to help the website follow political news and issues even if I’m not overseeing it often.
In the meantime I’m about to go halfway around the world to train some journalists in China. I’ve never had this kind of opportunity before and I am excited and nervous to go. I’m planning to spend some quite, focused time preparing for the trip. When I get back, I hope to spend more time digesting and sharing the lessons learned from the SmartDecisoin08.com project.
I have to leave a quick note here because I jumped into a little experiment with Twitter in the last couple of days. I decided to see if mid-Missouri would be interested in tweeting (that’s the verb used when you want to talk about that act of posting something on Twitter) politics leading up to election day (using a tag of #sd08). Once we all go to the polls, I’m also asking mid-Mo tweeters to send a post or two while they’re casting their ballot (using an additional tag of #votereport)
The #sd08 tag means it’s a part of Smart Decision ‘08. That’s a site that I have created with the help of committed students and professionals affiliated with a number of newsrooms in Columbia, MO. It has been my baby project for quite a while. One election day, I’m hoping mid-Missouri Twitter users will add an additional tag to help us keep track of their experience in the polls: #votereport. It’s a quest created nationally by Twitter.com. Hopefully Twitter users across the country will let us know what it’s really like when they cast a ballot. It’s also a way to see where things are going wrong. When I was talking to a representative at Twitter, I hear about this tweet:
OH_observers: #EPOH from 866 report -fake election officials letting people vote from parking lot in Columbus #votereport #43204 http://tinyurl.com/6nfrmw
I think that’s so cool that we can all participate and talk about experiences during the election year. I like this involvement so much that I’m producing a four hour webcast involving KOMU-TV, KBIA-FM, The Columbia Missourian and Newsy.com. During the webcast, you’ll be able to see details about what people are talking about from our Blog Watch Desk and I’ll have a segment where my Twitter watchers will let us know what’s going on. We’re also inviting the public to attend an election watch party as we record the webcast. We’ll check in with the participants and see what they’re talking about. It’s very exciting and it will be interesting to see what really happens. Four newsrooms. Four hours. Wow. You can watch it election night 8:00pm-midnight Central Time from SmartDecision08.com.
I’m taking part in a wonderful project through a non-profit group called e-thepeople. They put together a widget that helps you see your ballot, learn about the candidates and even print out your ballot before you go to the poll on November 4th.
The grand announcement for the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s innaugural class of fellows took place during last Friday’s dedication of the RJI building on the University of Missouri campus. I’m lucky to be part of this class. If you’d like to meet everyone, visit this link.
I consider this an awesome opportunity to take my Smart Decision ‘08 tool as a way to engage a regional audience. I hope to have more time and resources to push this project into a high place than I could have done if I had continued working on the project in my spare time. At the same time, I get to hang out with a really great group of people who are my “fellow fellows.”
In the aftermath of the Missouri School of Journalism’s centennial celebration, I’m happy to say I had a pretty successful experiment during the event. I had 114 freshmen, gave them access to WordPress, told them to attend sessions and asked them to blog about the various events. Some of the students were given the task to take Flip cameras and talk to journalism school alumni and collect answers about their careers and lessons learned during those careers. It’s all gathering into a pretty great channel on YouTube. We also had a backchannnel on what was going on during the event on Twitter. All in all, it was a lot of fun. Exausting but fun.
This week is a very historic week for the Missouri School of Journalism. We are celebrating the school’s cenennial and dedicating the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I’m very lucky to be a part of this event in many ways. The coolest is how I’m helping manage 100+ freshmen and a handful of upperclassmen who will pour through the events, document them and post what they gather to a blog, Flickr and YouTube. I’m exhausted with all of the planning but I look forward to finding out what we can do with this project.
In its simplest form, students will document the sessions. In the extreme form they will do that and collect photos, additional interviews and video. While some centennial reporters blog, I have another group of teams who will take Flip cameras and interview alumni for a massive YouTube project that I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I’m looking for alumni to share their experiences gained through the Missouri School of Journalism and their many jobs that followed. (Most journalist don’t stick around in one newsroom for long… Others are fortunate to work in the same one for a long time. I’m hoping we get all kinds of perspective) In the end of the project, I and a small team of students hope to create playlists of these interviews that have useful insight for the many industries represented by J-school graduates.
I will probably blog here with more insight after the event since I can’t even think right now due to the many logistics that go into this!!
