Twitter: The Road to Reporting Relevance?

by Glynnis MacNicol | 10:25 am, July 31st, 2009

» 4 comments

6a0105362b19d0970c01053689ee48970c-320wi Has Twitter become the great media divider, separating the wheat from the chaff? It’s beginning to seem that way. There are those journos who adapt to the 140-character restriction and then use it to expand their relevance to parts unknown, and there are those who don’t. The first is a group we are well-acquainted with (sometimes a little too well!) and their coverage tends to find its way into our posts time and time again simply because it is so timely and accessible. The other group? Well if they’re lucky enough to have already established a huge platform, like say the front and op-ed pages of the New York Times or a network newscast (we’re looking at you here BriWi!), we pay attention. Otherwise? Not sure.

WWD‘s Irin Carmon (@irincarmon) has taken a look at some of the journos who’ve managed to adapt and thrive! This on Time‘s (must-follow) Karen Tumulty a.k.a. @ktumulty:

These days, Tumulty juggles traditional Time magazine responsibilities — this week, a cover story with an Oval Office interview on health care — with her posts on Time’s Swampland blog and on Twitter, where she follows relevant sources on politics and health care reform. “Trying to adapt” means adjusting to the expectation that everything be backed up by a link to direct evidence, that posts are organic and can be updated with more information — and that absolutely everything she reports on will be second-guessed. She often addresses criticisms directly in a post’s comments, mixing it up with her Twitter followers on everything from the Congressional Budget Office to the fit of Sonia Sotomayor’s jacket.

“It’s almost like the Socratic method of journalism,” Tumulty says. “If you approach it the right way, it makes you a better reporter, and it makes you a sharper thinker.”

And this from Mark Knoller (@MARKKNOLLER), whose twitterfeed may be the most frequently mentioned on this blog.

“In 30 years of radio I would get an occasional letter, almost never a phone call,” says longtime CBS Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller. “It was hard to track me down — the CBS phone in the White House isn’t listed. But on Twitter everybody feels totally at ease telling me what they think.” He has responded to followers who, for example, accuse him of being too easy or too hard on the president, or who ask him questions drawing on his institutional memory of the White House since Gerald Ford.

Irin Carmon, Jake Tapper, Karen Tumulty, Time, Twiter, twitter, WWD

dccdudley

Christ in a sidecar. I know this is new media and all, but this has got to be the most error-ridden copy on a professional site I’ve ever seen. Basic usage, spelling, tense agreement … you name it. Is there no copy editor on hand who could have given it a look in the five hours since it’s been posted?
http://mediaite.com Steve Krakauer

Thanks for the heads up dccdudly – we corrected all the spelling/grammar mistakes…it was a group effort.

Also, feel free to go through the whole site and point out any similar mistakes – it would help us greatly.

Have a good weekend,
Steve
Glynnis MacNicol

“Christ in a sidecar” FTW.
peterfeld

I have to disagree with the thrust here. Twitter is not the divider of wheat from chaff here. I won’t say there aren’t reporters who use Twitter productively in their reporting, and to maintain a dialogue with readers (though there’s nothing wrong with plain old e-mail and comments under stories for the same purpose). Twitter is still, and is going to remain, a fringe phenomenon, a kind of cult where — as with all social media and user-generated content — 10% of the audience (which is a very long way from the complete universe of news consumers) produce 90% of the content. Reporters are obsessed with it, some of them anyway, and I think it’s nicely ego-feeding to a reporter to know there is an audience of several hundred or several thousand interested in their between-story musings and personal minutiae, trips to the snack machine, occasional crowd-sourcing, etc. This is why the NYT these days seems to be “all Twitter, all the time” — approaching the adorably eager yet naive way they covered the advent of e-mail’s adoption in the ’90s. Since Twitter is this year’s pet rock or Friendster (social media platforms having a fairly short half-life), not e-mail, all the effusive coverage is likely to look slightly embarrassingly dated in 5 years and totally mystifying in 20. It’s great for reporters to be early adopters and try new interactive platforms, but no one should mistake Twitter for a way reporters can interact with their general audience — power-users maybe — and also shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking the reactions they get on Twitter even represent the views of all those who are following them. And for God’s sake, no one should ever think that use of Twitter (whose inclusion in Mediate’s power grid is probably the main reason for such perplexingly anomalous rankings) is the hallmark of a good reporter.