The Evolving Newsroom

One of the most useful aspects of Twitter for me is following the links people post to their blogs and things they've been reading/watching. There's always good stuff in there.

But Twitter's like a 24-hour water cooler - people drift in for a while then move on and you never know who's going to be there when you show up nor what you've missed in the meantime.

You can look at someone's Twitter timeline and see everything they've been doing in the past few hours or days, but that can take a while.

Enter Twitturly, which lets you see what people have been linking to. It searches a Twitter user's timeline and pulls out posts containing links, filtering out the rest.

Go to http://twitturly.com and type in someone's Twitter username or type http://twitturly.com/user/username into your browser address bar.

Say you want to see what New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson's been linking to. Go to http://twitturly.com/user/fredwilson and you'll see a page like this:
















Type in http://twitturly.com/user/starrjulie and you'll see what I've been linking to.
















Nice.

For a truly comprehensive list of news services publishing on Twitter:

1. check out WikiNews
2. click on 'following'
3. scroll through the 550+ news services
4. click 'follow' on any you want to see every day in your Twitter inbox
5. monitor your Twitter box and 'unfollow' any that drive you mad with too-frequent updates

There's everything in there - AP, Washington Post, The Independent, The Guardian, The Age, Time, the Economist, NZ Herald, Wired, Gawker, Drudge Report, New Yorker, New York Post, Sacramento Bee, Modesto Bee... and roughly 535 more.

Here's something news sites in NZ might want to look at given we have an election coming up.

















Current, a peer-to-peer news aggregator and broadcaster, and Twitter, a popular social network/microblogging platform, have teamed up to cover the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden later today:

Current & Twitter have teamed up for the very first time to integrate real-time Twitter messages (aka "tweets") over major portions of a live television broadcast.

Hack the Debate by adding your Twitter posts to our live broadcast of the 2008 Presidential Debates.

We will broadcast as many of your debate tweets as possible right over the candidates, in real time, on our live broadcast.

In a nutshell, Twitter users comment on the debate as it happens and include the hashtag #current. (A hashtag - the # symbol followed by a keyword - is a way of tracking Twitter conversations about a particular topic.) Current TV will aggregate all those tweets tagged with #current and include them in its coverage of the debate.

This highlight package of the McCain/Obama debate run on Current gives you an idea of how it works.



Other tags to watch for on Twitter tonight are #dirtycoal | #dontgo | #notmygal | #pork | #suspend - check out Nancy Scola's post on techPresident to find out the relevance. (Thanks to Imogen for the link).

I love this: a group of venture capitalists have set up a Twitter channel, VCTips, to give advice to startups who are trying to raise seed money.

Among the words of wisdom articulated in 140 characters or less (the limit of a Twitter post is 140 characters):

• Having your PC bog down in the middle of a presentation is a bummer. Come into the meeting on a clean boot. (@robhayes)
• It's perfectly ok to make mistakes in running your start up, just don't make the same ones twice (@aweissman)
• this is for everyone. not just entrepreneurs. don't ask for advice if you really don't want to hear it (@bijan)
• no powerpoint slide should ever have 26 bullet points on it. (@bfeld)
• when I ask for your revenue model four times and receive four different sets of hand waving I am going to get suspicious. (@robhayes)
• trying to be "X done right" when X = an unproven service is not a compelling way to frame your business. (@bryce)t
• he trend is your friend; demonstrate how a market is or will be growing in alignment with your business. timing is everything. (@aweissman)
• if you haven't bothered to run your presentation through a spell checker I am likely to make the assumption that you are not detail oriented (@robhayes)
• words to eliminate from your vcpitch - "space" (@bfeld)
• another word to abolish from your vocabulary: "traction". That's what you are in when you have a serious accident. (@bfeld)
• If the VC has a blog, read it. It should give you some good insight into how they think... (@joshk)

Want more? Join Twitter and follow VCTips.

I got a bit of a reality check at the GIMD journalism conference I attended recently, in several ways.

The conference was held in Bali and its scope included ethics, minorities and reporting in conflict zones. I spoke, briefly, about how the internet is profoundly changing the delivery of news, how people find and keep up to date with news, who gathers news and how.

Among other things, I touched on how much information is available online, how we can download Google Earth for free, check out Wikipedia (and contribute to it), ask questions of Yahoo Answers and Google, get news alerts from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, RSS feeds and email, how free blogs and cheap mobile phones seriously lower the entry barrier to publishing. And how news companies, faced with declining audiences, have little option but to jump into this new reality.

I acknowledged how poor infrastructure and censored internet access limit this explosion of new communication pathways in many countries. But I was grateful to have a few more home truths illuminated for me.

For a start, an Eastern European journalist made a point of taking me aside and saying, in essence: 'You know, all those RSS feeds are fine, but they're not much use if you only speak, say, Slovenian. In my country I can count on two hands the number of RSS feeds in my language that are worth subscribing to.'

I can't help but think that an explosion of output from individuals in such countries will only be a matter of time - as the price of entry falls (cheap desktop computers and mobile phones) and connectivity increases with the spread of broadband infrastructure. But it's a fair point.

As I've mentioned before, it was sobering to hear people talk about having their lives threatened, of having sources imprisoned for talking to them, and learning that 172 journalists and media staff died in the course of their work last year, according to the International Federation of Journalists.

It was maddening to hear a journalist joke about how his company had created a blog without his knowing and published his columns on it - given this was a conference that dealt with ethics it struck me as of considerable concern if it were true and in poor taste if it were a stretched truth, which I suspect it was. (I am in the camp who see a ghost-written blog as a pointless fraud and a blog that simply republishes a newspaper column as, well, simply pointless.)

On the upside I heard about a family under house arrest who used a smuggled mobile phone and Twitter to keep in touch with the outside world. And I met someone who works with a group that excels at hiding internet connections from snooping oppressors.

I learned that in parts of rural China the availability of cheap mobile phones with cheap data plans is combining with growing use of wi-max to bring connectivity to communities who might otherwise have waited their lifetime for hard-wired infrastructure to reach them.

I read while I was in Bali about an environmental protest in Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province, that had been organised through blogs, websites and text messages. The protesters 'walked peacefully' through the city to 'criticise the building of an ethylene plant and oil refinery in Pengzhou, a few minutes' drive outside the city.'

The earthquake now dominating news headlines struck Sichuan a few days later.

Today I read about an initiative started on Facebook in Egypt (where only 8pc of the population have internet access), which its young organisers had hoped would launch a passive protest but which waned as group members lost interest, confidence or heart. Later, some told of seizures and beatings received because of their involvement.

It's an uneven world.

This is interesting. The Washington Post is going to run stories from popular technology blogging site TechCrunch (#1 in the world according to BloggerBoard) in its Technology section.

"TechCrunch will provide washingtonpost.com readers concentrated and continuously updated insights into cutting-edge start-ups, products and other online ventures," the Washington Post says in a press release.

"This addition rounds out the Technology section, which already provides in-depth reporting on the latest news and trends affecting every aspect of the technology industry, from medical innovations to the evolutions in global media policy, personal technology to issues of security."

It's only a matter of time before content deals between established niche blogging sites and mainstream news providers become commonplace, surely.

Link via journalism.co.uk (via Twitter).

It's not just me, then. I see Jeff Jarvis is also getting annoyed with the way news companies are dumping multiple headlines on Twitter in big batches, with the result that they fill out people's Twitter boxes.

jeffjarvis The roadblock of NYTimes tweets is irritating me. I don't want every damned headline as a tweet. 26 minutes ago from web

In fact, it's not just me and Mr Jarvis, anecdotally at least. I've had several people tell me how much it annoys them. The problem, I think, is that the simplest and currently most rational approach to publishing news on Twitter is to push RSS feeds on there - an automated process that doesn't require expensive human intervention. But RSS feeds get pushed out in lumps at certain time intervals and it ends up looking like this:
















Twitter is quite an intimate communication forum. Over time you make acquaintances and become increasingly interested in hearing what they have to say, what they've been reading, and enjoy having conversations with them. To have great lumps of news headlines dumped in the middle of all this is an intrusion. A couple of headlines here and there is fine, but a lump isn't.

Ideally, you'd have a separate Twitter channel for news. Well, I would, plus others on an ad hoc basis for projects I'm working on. But it's currently not possible to have multiple Twitter accounts under one username, as far as I'm aware, and I can't be bothered logging in with multiple usernames and email addresses each day. Not now, anyway.

The Guardian's Jemima Kiss this week pointed up the possibility of Twitter dropping ads in as sparsely drip-fed tweets, following a post from Duncan Riley on TechCrunch suggesting it was the only way for Twitter to make money: "Occasional ads in the Twitter timeline, in a similar fashion to what Twitteriffic users currently see (Twitteriffic runs its own ads on the free version) seems like the only real way to monetise Twitter, aside for premium subscriptions. The only question remaining is how Twitter users will accept the move after a two year free ride," he said.

But Twitter subsequently denied it (you can see the tweets in an update on Jemima's post). Thank goodness for that. I think ads in my Twitter box would kill it for me. Maybe not immediately, but over time. I struggle with the ads that show up in my Facebook news feed as it is. Well, to be fair, the news feed's just not that interesting any more, but the ads don't help.

In the meantime, I think it's worth looking at building Twitter headlines into newsroom workflows so they are written at the same time as headlines and mobile alerts and pushed in smaller batches on more of a breaking news model: if it's big, tweet it, if it's not, stick it on the website and in the paper. As Mr Jarvis said, we 'don't want every damned headline as a tweet'.

The smart people at Common Craft have turned their talents to explaining Twitter 'in Plain English' to people who've never heard of it.

The video misses some of my favourite things about Twitter, such as being able to see what people are reading and follow the link they've posted so you can read it too - in other words that it's another window onto the online world. (In fact, thanks to @FND who posted this link on Twitter).

Nor does it mention the way you can build up communities of people who share your work or personal interests and pick their brains.

But it does a good job with the basics (as ever):

I've signed up for Twitter reports from the police department in Hawaii. No particular reason, just because I could. And because I thought it'd be interesting to see how Twitter might work for hyperlocal news services.

Anyway, I'm finding the Hawaii police reports strangely comforting. They are almost always traffic incidents and so far wonderfully benign:

ktlink
traffic incident - no collision 124x ainakoa ave
about 1 hour ago from web

ktlink stalled/hazardous vehicle 46010x kahekili hwy kahekili dip kaneohe
about 1 hour ago from web

Doesn't Kahekili sound nice and exotic. Could be an absolute dump for all I know but I'd like to visit.

Not a bad idea sending out traffic reports on Twitter, is it? Users could read them in their browser at work before heading out the door or have tweets forwarded to their mobile.

This is worth a look if you're a news-hungry Twitter fan. It's a list of news organisations posting updates to Twitter. Thanks to the compiler, Carlos Granier-Phelps.

Since my last post on Twitter as a news delivery service, I've signed up for two New York Times feeds and noticed that they're using a headline-only format which solves the problem of tight space quite neatly, I think:

	nyt_world New South Korean Leader Cleared in Fraud Inquiry http://tinyurl.com/34mzyb 3 minutes ago from web
	nyt_national Justices Shield Medical Devices From Lawsuits http://tinyurl.com/35znuc 4 minutes ago from web

But while the headlines were succinct the feeds came in floods. I signed up for two, world and national, which quickly took over my Twitter page:

















It was even worse on my phone, taking over two or three screens. It made me wonder if it would be possible to stagger the timing of feeds so they didn't all go at once. It would certainly make multiple feeds more palatable to users.

Following on from looking at Twitter as a news delivery mechanism, I've been reading Paul Bradshaw's thoughts on using it as a communication tool in newsrooms.

He suggests signing up editors and reporters to Twitter accounts with mobile access and having them follow one another. That way they can give and take direction, file updates on where they are and what they're working on, and ask each other for tips, contacts, information.

This is not an entirely new idea. The topline instant message systems built into older print and radio CMSs have long given reporters a way to talk to each other instantly, directly and succinctly.

Twitter's different only in that it's web-based and mobile so you can take it with you wherever you go (give or take a few connectivity black spots). And it's group-based so you can have as few or as many people in your network as you want.

Obvious drawbacks raised by one commenter were that some people would see it as 'being watched' and resent having to participate; others would file updates only to look busy.

Fair point. It can sometimes be better to introduce tools rather than impose them - ie make a range of tools available and see which ones stick. That way there's more ownership and less friction: 'design for how people really are.' Early adopters have a way of catching others up in their enthusiasm and once enough people find the tool useful it will gain traction and can then become officially adopted.

Another current drawback is that you can't have multiple Twitter profiles on a single email account, so if a journalist wanted to keep work and private life separate they'd have to have two Twitter identities using different email accounts, which is a real faff.

The final hazard would be the IT department getting wind of it: they'd probably put it on the banned list.

Perhaps an in-house version might be better for newsroom communication, with Twitter best used as a tool for individual journalists to tell people what they're working on and ask for ideas and help not just from colleagues but their Twitter buddies and the blogosphere as well.

I've been getting news feeds on Twitter from BBC, Radio NZ and a Netherlands based group called BreakingNewsOn for a couple of months. So far, I'd say Twitter works really well for delivering news.

From a user point of view it's great - news finds me instead of me having to find it, I can see just enough information to decide whether or not I want to read more, and I can click through to the source site to read more when I am interested.

From a publisher's point of view, it's also great - cheap, relatively easy to set up an automated feed, and another way of getting news out to audiences in their own environment rather than relying on them to make the effort to visit your website.

It's ideal for publishing breaking news (it's like a ticker that runs not just across your website but across your users' screens too). It also seems to work well for regular round-ups, provided the headlines are re-written to reflect the nature of the update. Twitter users have no way of knowing at a glance that the story's been updated if the headline looks the same as it did an hour ago.

There are a few limitations:

• You have to keep the character count to 140 and the link has to follow the headline/abstract. The headline can't act as a link. It would be great if Twitter could make the latter possible. It's a tight publishing space, so it really helps to keep your identifier short. BBC works well - it leaves plenty of room for text. BreakingNewsOn is way too long.
  

• The headline IS the story. I gather most news services are serving RSS feeds to Twitter which run headline: standfirst/intro and chop off once the character count runs out, leaving a dangling ellipsis (...) followed by the link. Here's an example:
  

BBC TV poll backs Berwick border move: According to a television poll, 60% of people in Berwick-upon-Tweed want t.. http://tinyurl.com/2v9obe 32 minutes ago from twitterfeed

This does the job, although to be honest I find the ... just as annoying as anywhere else I see it online. I'd prefer to see:

BBC TV poll backs Berwick border move: TV poll finds 60% of people in Berwick-upon-Tweed want to be part of Scotland. http://tinyurl.com/2v9obe 32 minutes ago from twitterfeed

Ultimately, it'd be great to see a Twitter headline and standfirst written somewhere in the story workflow that wouldn't break when published. This could also be used for mobile.

• There's a problem with overkill. Part of the fun of Twitter is seeing a stream of diverse posts and conversations. News gets in the way if the feeds take up too much room (there are only 20 posts per Twitter page, no one wants 16 of them to be news posts). One way around this is to break the feeds down to sections: politics, world, Auckland, business, technology, sport etc. Then people can choose just those feeds they're interested in and are less likely to get inundated.

I posted the other day about Radio NZ adding news feeds on Twitter, which I think is a great move. There are quite a few US and UK news feeds available, but as far as I'm aware RNZ is the only New Zealand news organisation providing feeds to the Twitterati. So well done them.

But they deserve a mention for more than that. I noted a couple of kinks in the service and decided to email them my thoughts using the contact email they provide on the website. Their webmaster replied with a friendly, detailed email two days later (it was a weekend after all.) Spot on. Now there's someone who understands customer service and the value of community.

Community, like it or not, is the future. Digital citizens are not happy just looking at your news website and using your services in a static way. They want to be able to engage. To tell you what they think of your service, to make suggestions (which are sometimes very good), to talk to each other about news stories (and your service). If you don't give them the chance to engage, they'll give up on you eventually and go somewhere else. These ideas are well articulated in a couple of books I've read recently, if you're interested: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics. The Wisdom of Crowds also comes highly recommended.

The kinks I mentioned in my previous post were that you seem to get the same stories repeated across the day, which gets a bit tiresome and clogs up your Twitterbox.

RNZ explained that the stories are only repeated when there has been an update, although the headline may not have been rewritten. They plan on improving the system to amend this, and another issue related to linking back to stories from Twitter, but there's a bit of work involved:

"The current publishing software was designed to meet our needs when we built the site 3 years ago. But the software interface between our newsroom system and the website CMS was written in-house (in Perl), so we can easily change the way it works to create a 'publish stories once' news feed. There are some other non-trivial changes we'd have to make within the CMS to accommodate this and also ensure that urls to updated stories remained the same over the life of a story."

Glad to know there's a will and a way. Other news organisations should take a leaf out of RNZ's book: engaging with your audience works. I had a quibble, RNZ made it possible for me to get in touch with them, I did, they explained the situation, I'm happy with the explanation and remain a happy customer. Simple, really.

Well done Radio New Zealand for setting up a newsfeed on Twitter. It's good to be able to get New Zealand news updates this way (to balance out the many overseas news feeds available).

There may be a few kinks to iron out, mind you, in that the feed gets a bit repetitive - I was informed several times over today about our Southland sheep-shearing champion, Jimmy Clark. Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed with his achievement (560 ewes) but I only needed to hear about his efforts once.

I think Twitter is best suited for breaking news - just the top line - and updates when something has changed. It's not well suited for a stream of repeated bulletin headlines across the day - they clog up your Twitterbox, make it harder for you to see other tweets of interest and leave you reaching for the 'block' button.

No idea what I'm talking about? Go here, sign up, find me (I'm starrjulie) and follow me. (Or just click on the link on the left of this blog.) You'll soon get the idea.

Robin Hamman, a BBC journalist and blogger, posts about using Twitter as a way to get your finger on the pulse of a breaking news story.

You can search Twitter for key words, such as Bhutto, to see what people are saying about the story. Not only will you get a sense of what sentiment is around, but also in some cases first-hand accounts of events and plenty of links to news stories around the world.

Robin recommends using a tool from David Sterry called Tweet Scan. It's simple, but effective. Just type in a keyword and hit Search. If you register you can also subscribe to keywords so you get updates via email or RSS.