Steph Stuff

I got an email out of the blue earlier tonight from Kari Cobham, a reporter at the Daytona Beach News-Journal asking some excellent questions about using Twitter and how to pitch it to her newsroom. The questions she asked actually came verbatim from her editors. Kari sounds like a reporter who “gets it” and I totally love her enthusiasm! She is meeting with these editors tomorrow and wanted some ammo to take in with her. I don’t know if I gave enough ammo, but I sure do talk a lot.

Here are her questions, and my answers:

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Wow, someone read my blog Thanks! Let’s see if I can be of help to you. The revenue question doesn’t sound like your biggest hurdle, but the awesome website Old Media New Tricks (http://www.oldmedianewtricks.com, @mediatricks on Twitter) had some wonderful responses to this question:

• This effort is more about marketing our brand than a direct dollar-for-dollar payback. If we do this right, our brand is seen as a part of their lives. Besides, these social media tools are (generally) free. We have little to lose by trying.
• If we don’t do this, then we risk becoming irrelevant. This is the way people are communicating at an increasing rate, and we are in the communications business.
• This can be used for good customer service. Social media allows for us to respond to customers swiftly and effectively. It’s hard to measure the effect of good customer service, but it is easy to measure the effect of bad or nonexistent customer service.
• It’s not about making money right now, but this just might make money in the long run. If we don’t plant our flag now and learn to do this the right way, we’ll be behind the curve.
• We can reach an entirely new audience for our product. That’s the holy grail, isn’t it? With the economy the way it is, now is the time to try to reach out to new people.

The rest of your questions, let me take one-by-one.

How do we do it with with a shrinking staff?

I have a newsroom of 6 beats, 3 sports guys, 1 videographer and 2 photogs. They all have twitter accounts. So far only 1 photog and the video guy will tweet. Neither of them have quite got the hang of it yet, but I give them mega points for effort. My paper’s main Twitter account is me. I use Twhirl (twhirl.org) and keep it running in the background while I work. I watch for any updates the newsroom posts, I tweet it immediately. I listen to the chatter in there and tweet anything that will be newsworthy.

To answer your question, you need someone who will be willing to do this. I don’t think you will have much luck getting everyone to do it – yet. I haven’t. But you should find someone in your newsroom, or if you have an online team – a web editor, something – I don’t know how your newsroom is structured. Ours is sort of weird. Ask them if they would be willing to tweet headlines a few times a day. Or it may end up on your shoulders.

You have to build a network too. Someone must take some time and start following people in your area and get them to follow you back. Once you get the ball rolling, it grows fairly quickly especially if you tweet your headlines manually and engage with your followers. But someone simply has to to do it. Don’t expect the other reporters to jump on the bandwagon especially if they are worried about ‘one more thing’ they have to do.

The flipside to the above, is that manually tweeting the headlines isn’t all that time-consuming. At least for me. I tweet a hello message in the morning, answer an @reply or two, and then just tweet headlines I think the readers might find cool, or of interest to them. I include feature stuff, a good letter to the editor, the latest column or blog post from our community bloggers… it doesn’t always have to be a headline tweet. But I find something at random times, tweet it and then go back to whatever I was working on. At the end of the day, I tweet what we’re working on for tomorrow.

How do we get around the current prohibition against posting anything without first getting and editor to read and approve it?

This is tricky if your newsroom is really a stickler about this. The headlines I tweet are ones I can link to, so they don’t go on Twitter until it’s on the site, which means it’s been approved. I will tweet something like ‘Photogs have just been sent to check on a car accident’ or even stuff like ‘The Governor is in our office right now to talk to _____ about his budget plans’ or something. But if you check out my tweets at http://twitter.com/theindependent you’ll get a feel for the kinds of things you can say. And don’t be afraid to retweet your competition too

Can reporters Twitter in an interesting way, and engage in conversations with readers, without voicing an opinion, which is required to do their job? Will this have to be limited to columnists, who can have an opinion?

There are many ways a journo can use Twitter. They can use it simply to network with other journalists and make contacts. They can use it to cover meetings, events and breaking news – just look at how it was used during the Mumbai attacks. Watch CNN reporters on Twitter to see how they are doing it and use it as a guideline. I don’t quite feel qualified to answer this question very thoroughly, and my answer here might not be workable. But there are a lot of comments in this article you might find helpful: http://is.gd/aiRY – but no this does not need to be limited to columnists.

Will it generate sufficient audience to make it a worthwhile use of our reporters’ time?

Yes, but you have to take the time to build that audience. You can’t just start tweeting and expect them to come. You need to pimp the hell out of it in print and online. Reverse publish. Make the latest tweets visible somewhere on the website. Have the staff add ‘Follow Us on Twitter’ with the link to their email sigs. Follow people in your community from your paper’s main feed. Heck, follow people outside the community. I ended up searching for all Twitterers in the entire state. My logic was that perhaps they have ties to my town. And if not, then no harm. They know we exist. Invest in the time to grow the community in the beginning. Once it shows signs of growing on its own, then I think that would be the time to try and pull in other reporters and staff to maybe help out, or start their own account.

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Apologies to poor Kari for the length, but I hope it’s at least helpful.

Tags: newsroom, twitter