Live tweeting Trump at the NYT

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

Alexandra Ma, one of my current crop of Interactive Journalism students, looks at how the New York Times live covered its meeting with Trump:

But out of all the ways the Times covered the event, Twitter was by far the most effective.

The Times’ social media strategy editor, Michael Gold, created a public Twitter list of the journalists who had attended so people could follow — and instantly react to — direct quotes from the president-elect.

But that, in itself, brings some problems:

The Times’ journalists mostly tweeted direct quotes from Trump, some of which — such as his suggestion that Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist and former editor of Breitbart News, was neither racist nor alt-right — seemed factually dubious and would be best accompanied with fact checking after the event.

The danger of immediacy is clearly lack of contextualisation – and that needs to be there.

donald trumpJournalismlive coveragelivetweetingnew york timesPolitics

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Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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