At re:publica 09 I attended a very interesting workshop held by Bicyclemark about Twitter and journalism.

I did some research of my own; a short abstract on this topic can be found below.

Can Twitter be a substitute for professional journalism?

There have been some occasions when an event has been reported on Twitter before it has been reported by any other news source.

For example: most people know about the airplane’s landing on the Hudson River in New York. Janis Krums saw the plane from a nearby ferry, took a picture and linked it on Twitter before TV stations or news agencies reported on it.

In theory, when everybody is tweeting, the masses will spread details of occurrences sooner than the ‘old media’.

There is a catch however. People can only tweet what happened, but not how or why it happened. There still has to be somebody who does the research after the event. Twitter is quick, but it can only scratch the surface of what is going on.

So Twitter will not be a substitute for professional journalism, but maybe it can be a great tool for journalists.

Journalists publish with Twitter

Publishers use Twitter already – but in different ways.

• Most online newspapers just link their articles on twitter (e.g.: The Guardian), which makes it something like an RSS feed in a different environment. It can be valuable if there is a low tweet frequency with articles of a specific nature. A Twitter account with tweets for all articles of a big online newspaper can be very overwhelming.

• Some newspapers publish special content with Twitter. For example, the German Zeit Online runs a Twitter account with five Zeit journalists tweeting about anything they think is relevant for Zeit readers – a very original approach.

• An increasing number of journalists also have private accounts (e.g.: David Pogue, NYT). Writing about themselves makes journalists more “human” for their readers and it can add a certain extra value besides their work for the newspaper.

Journalists use Twitter to research

• Through the Twitter search and the #Hashtag, you can get a pretty good idea about what is moving people at that moment in time and what they think about the goings-on. Twitter is a real-time Zeitgeist machine that tells journalists what people are interested in.

• Journalists who have to research for an article can ask their followers if they know anything about a specific topic. If you have one thousand followers, the chances are good that there is one who knows someone who might know something.

A journalist who also attended the workshop shared a nice story about this: he obtained information that the boy who ran amok in Winnenden, announced it the day before on an image board called Krautchan. He didn’t know what Krautchan was, so he asked around on Twitter. He actually received feedback from a guy who wrote his thesis on Krautchan. So they got in touch and soon after it became clear that the announcement must have been a fake. Every other big newspaper in Germany – and even the authorities – accepted the announcement as true and wrote about it, simply to call it off a day later.

• CNN has a pretty aggressive approach to researching on Twitter. They try to recruit interview partners with Twitter. Again during the Winnenden tragedy – see @Clare20092009, though the account hasn’t been used since then.

Related articles:

Techcrunch – Plane Crashes In Hudson. First Pictures On Flickr, Tumblr, TwitPic

New York Times, David Pogue – Twitter? It’s what you make it.

The Guardian – Media Talk Podcast: Twitter @G20

ReadWriteWeb – How we use Twitter for Journalism