Real-time success! A Live Tweeting Update

03 Feb 2010 5 Comments

by Stephin Social Media, Tools of the trade, Working on the Newsroom Tags: , , , ,

Today was one of those days that makes you remember why you love this business so much. And if ever a case was made for every reporter in every newsroom having a smartphone, today was it.

When I walked into the newsroom this morning, the publisher was talking to the city editor and our temporary mobile journalist about a call he’d gotten from a local high school. His son attends the school and they were informing parents about an apparent shooting threat. They told parents they could keep their kids at home or come pick them up if they had already been dropped off. Heavily armed police officers were guarding the school and calls were starting to come into the newsroom from panicked parents.

Since we are on Day Three of our live tweeting experiment, our intrepid journo with the Droid headed up to the school to see what he could find out. As soon as he arrived, the information started flowing right onto our front page. And it was an awesome sight to behold. He was able to get in and speak to the plethora of parents who had arrived to pick up their kids and find out more information from the police and school officials.

The next thing I know, I’m getting a flood of Facebook friend requests (our Twitter updates flow to our Facebook page) from people following the story on our website. When they held an impromptu press conference to assure parents their kids would be safe to come back to class, Jack used Qik on his Droid to send it live as it happened. When it ended, I was able to embed the video right into the full story another reporter wrote when all the excitement died down.

We were able to tweet – as the words “the suspect has been arrested” as the words were coming out of the Administrator’s mouth, flowing it to our site and thus making our leap into real time news. It was incredible to behold and the best part is the entire newsroom, from my usual ‘bah humbuggers’ to the ones who’ve embraced it, could finally see all of this in action.

I think it’s one thing to talk about the Hudson River landing and Twitter’s role there, or Twitter’s role with Haitian relief to these folks, but it’s simply not going to “sink in” until they can see it in action locally like they did this morning.

It’s been an awesome morning. I will stipulate that by also saying I am terribly glad nobody was hurt and that the threats never came to fruition. My daughter graduated from this very school only last year.

Yesterday, we held an impromptu meeting to discuss some issues with this experiment and to see what could be improved. Some lessons from that – and from this morning are below:

  • How can we flow images and video to our own site instead of sending traffic away to Twitpic or Qik? – It can be done, but it’s clunkier than simply using the tools built into apps like Twidroid or Tweetie. I think we’d have to build an app from the ground up, which is beyond our ken. And Barbie.
  • Will a non-Twitter user understand how to disseminate the information we are sending into our Juitter extension? Does it become confusing to follow when the latest tweets are on top? – I think today proved that this really isn’t an issue. I have yet to hear from anyone who was glued to our coverage today complain about the order in which tweets arrived.
  • Reign in the ‘casual observations’ such as “I’m moving on someplace else” or “Bob left the room”. – When reporting news on our front page, we should keep it to the news and leave off the ambiance a little. This is fine for regular tweeting, but maybe not so much on our front page. I haven’t decided whether I agree with this yet. Still pondering.
  • In today’s big news story, when reporting real-time, avoid phrases like “I’m hearing that ….” and reporting rumors. – I’m of two minds on this. I can see that a newspaper reporting ‘I spoke to a lady who says her kids tell her students carry guns to school’ might give credence to false information. On the other hand, one of our reporters said that when you’re reporting live on the scene, the rumors become part of the story. I can see that. I think it’s a very fine line, though, between ‘just the facts’ and reporting the mood and observations of a scene like that.

What do you think?

Live tweeting. An all-day experiment

01 Feb 2010 5 Comments

by Stephin Social Media, Tools of the trade Tags: , ,

For the next two weeks, The Independent will be live tweeting all day, every day. What the hell am I talking about? Don’t I already tweet all day every day?

Not like this.

We had the crazy idea to spend 8 hours a day (barring travel time) each weekday traveling around the town an tweeting what’s happening right now in Grand Island. From pothole repairs in the cold to a trailer fire, our Presentation editor, Jack Sheard,  (also known as the only guy in the office with a smartphone – a Verizon Droid to be exact) will go out and about either with a reporter or photographer, or on his own and cover our town.

And we will feed those tweets into a beachfront spot on the front page of our website

Today is Day One.

What have we learned so far?

  • That Yahoo Pipes don’t like it if you send them too many search queries, so we had to remove the twitpic feed.
  • That the Twitter account we wanted to use for this, @GIRightNow, won’t feed into Juitter properly and we have no idea why. So Jack is using his own account for this, which works perfectly fine. Go figure. It’s probably some API annoyance with @GIRightNow being a new account or something silly like that.
  • That we have “dead air” so to speak while Jack is driving. Although, it seems like dead air to us because we’re watching this closely, but it probably doesn’t to the average, casual reader stopping by the page. Even so, we’re going to use the dead time to point folks to parts of our website that they might not have known existed.
  • That filling 8 hours a day in our small-ish city might be quite a task :)

There will be more lessons learned I am sure and I’ll either update this post or start a new one with those as we go. Here are some questions we’ve had about this experiment:

What’s the point of it? A new way to create stickiness on the website and drive pageviews (we hope).

What happens when the two weeks are up? We hope to show the value of Twitter for our readers and to our newsroom (and possible advertisers) by being able to get the news (the important stuff and the casual ‘why are they fixing potholes in the Winter’ stuff) to our readers and further brand us as the go-to source for local news and information. After we see how this experiment goes, we may decide to find a permanent spot on the website for the latest tweets and incorporate more news that may not make it online or into print there from all of our reporters.

How can you spare the time to do this? We just had to make the time, cover shifts and work as the awesome team we all are to be able to do this. We feel it’s important to experiment. It’s better to try and fail than not try at all. Most of all, we want to improve our readers’ experience when they visit our website.

Keep an eye on us. We’re doing good things.