Panel chained by Laura Oliver of Journalism.co.uk
Suw Charman-Anderson is talking about Ada Lovelace day, an event to celebrate women in technology, and give women good technology role models. They had 1000 people sign up in the first day, and meme mainly spread through Twitter. The Facebook group was closed and inwards-looking and many people who joined the events page didn't sign up to the pledge. Twitter spread the idea widely through retweeting. Will be more Ada Lovelace events and another day next year.
Kevin Anderson is up next, talking about twittering and blogging his way across the US for the presidential election. Use Twitter to crowd-source question. Took him back to his early reporting days in Kansas. Blogging brought him back that sense of immediacy that he lost when he went to national press. "The worst thing is to be in the field and not to be able to file". The US trip was an experiment - came down to blog as the hub, with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as the main tools. @s and DMs while he was moving - a 2 month conversation in the field with his audience. Met people and made contact (ie built community) as he went. Found it difficult to aggregate everything they did in one place on the site - hard to add the right context. And how do you aggregate the interaction?
Guy Degen now. He's an independent freelance using Twitter in the field. "The 3G wonderland" - nice phrase. Reporting on opposition protest in Georgia. All he had was his Nokia N82, and was able to use Twitter tag search to be aware of major developments. He's no longer isolated while working alone in the field. (He's @fieldreports BTW). Photojournalism via TwitPic. Gives visual backup. Used Utterly then, now AudioBoo for audio reporting - talking as walking and offering in-depth coverage. And live-streaming via Qik. Frontline Club network helped spread reporting, orchestrated by Graham Holliday. Main advice: practice and experiment with the tools, so they know how to use them when something big happens. Beware using bad taste usernames, as one news organisation did with the German shootings.
Mark Jones of Reuters. 4 stages of Twitters use amongst Reuters journalists:
- Cynicism
- Curiosity
- Engagement
- Addiction
Reuters twitterers have beaten their own wire - "if we don't do it, someone else will". You need to feed conversations around the event into it. Gordon Brown event - conversation was detached from event. David Cameron enthralled by Tweetdeck. Cameron went on to answer other questions via YouTube.
Q&A Notes
In some countries Twitter isn't the major microblogging service.
Twibble was Kevin's pick for geo-aware Twitter.
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