I think there are all kinds of different ways to use Twitter – I hope we can teach those who are interested the most efficient ways a newsroom and a journalist can use this tool.

What are ways you use Twitter for yourself as a journalist or for your newsroom/brand. I love hearing and knowing all of the many different ways. That helps me guide and teach future journalists how to think in as many directions as possible!

In honor of Las Vegas, I want to share a moment I experience on my flight as I arrived into town. One of our flight attendants happens to be an Elvis impersonator… And he and the rest of the crew put on a show. I was pretty far in the back of the plane – but I hope you can enjoy the fact that we got a performance and we lit up the aisle using the flight attendant alert lights.

UPDATE: The three hour presentation and one-on-one help time was awesome. I hope anyone who attended (or wish they had) will leave questions and comments here. The conversation doesn’t have to end with this session. To help with that, here’s the slides (and more that we never had time to show) from the presentation:

If you want to sit down and watch part one, go here.
If you want to see my notes on Twitter basics, go here.

And now… Part two:

I loaded up the first half of the presentation… The second half included questions and answers and a little bit of show and tell. If you have questions or need some show and tell, leave a comment here and I’ll see if I can help get you started.

Here are the slides I used during the presentation just in case you’re curious. I ran through a few pretty quickly to get to the second half of the presentation.

All of my follow up notes to this presentation are a permanent link to the right of the blog called “Twitter Tips.” Please feel free to leave comments here if there are additional details that were missed.

UPDATE: You can go here to watch part 2 of the webcast.

If you tour their website you can see the experience in so many ways… But the most amazing piece of video tops their site and I think it’s worth sharing in so many ways. The newsroom started this video the day Scripps announced the paper was up for sale on December 4th. The sudden end of the paper rushed the video to final production and posted to Vimeo around 11:00PM on February 26th.

Poynter started a support page on their site for the Rocky employees and made it a place for the journalism community to reach out and help. There’s a live chat in a few minutes as well.

It hurts even more knowing this isn’t the last paper to fall.

(One other thing I just found. Someone is trying to make a little money and let out some steam with the website, Who Killed The Rocky?)

I don’t seem to write much about things without throwing Twitter into the topic line — I’ll work on that since there are SO many interesting developments and discussions that I’m involved in these days as we try to create a new future for journalism. But first I need to mention my pet project that reaches its conclusion tomorrow night: The worldwide Twestival celebration. (The image above shows a map with many locations for the event) Here’s a little bit about what it’s all about:

I jumped into this project to try and have a productive reason for Twitter users who live around Columbia, MO to get together. I announced it over Twitter and eventually on Facebook as well. We could have as few as 25 people in attendance (27 if you count my two children who will attend with us) and as many as 50. The location was donated, the food, fun stuff like a projector and screen, music and a Wii. It will be fun. The whole point is to raise money for charity:water. I didn’t know much about this organization until I helped put this event together with the Twestival organizers. Each location got its own blog and support in setting up services that help you collect funding. Services like Amiano and TipJoy. These are tools I would have never known about without joining this experience. We plan to have a webcam up so you can see the fun from the LiveEarth site. Many people will tweet the event using the #CoMoTwestival hashtag. I hope to take pictures if I can. 

I participated in the twitter chatter behind Poynter’s NewsU introduction to Twitter for journalists. They created a wonderful page that explains Twitter for Journalists. I hope newbies will check it out. There’s also a really nice collection of links on this delicious page. With all of this talk about Twitter, I recently set up a date to give an introduction of twitter to the general journalism school: March 2. I’ve had so many people interested in this tool, I hope I can break through the stoic disbelief and really show how it can be helpful for journalists. Tomorrow I’m certain it will show that it can make a difference and reach the Twestival organizers’ goal of raising $1 million. News events like Mumbai and the Hudson River Crash should help prove it as a useful journalistic tool. (By the way – here’s my first post on Twitter to prove that I’ve been obsessed about this stuff for a while)

Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.

A slide from my presentation

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.

Now I’ll try to stop ranting.