6/25/09 5:08 AMAJR - The Twitter ExplosionPage 3 of 6http://ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=4756
basis, cultivating a deeper relationship with like-minded sources.Veteran new-media blogger and Arizona State University journalism professor Dan Gillmor says journalistsshould view Twitter as a "collective intelligence system" that provides early warnings about trends, peopleand news. Journalists, he says, should "follow people who point them to things they should know about"and direct questions back to them to do better reporting. He recommends setting up keyword searches andunderstanding "hashtags," Twitter-speak for a group of tweets about the same subject or event, indicated bya # sign and topic word (such as "swineflu").If he were running a news organization, Paul Grabowicz, director of the new-media program at theUniversity of California, Berkeley's journalism school, says Twitter would be as much a part of hisnewsroom's daily reporting arsenal as phones and notepads. "I would be asking everyone on my staff, 'Whoare the people and target groups you're trying to reach? Can you start a Twitter group to follow those people?' " Twitter, he says, enables reporters "to reach people where they are. People are busy, but they'reout there consuming and exchanging information on these networks. This is a way of bridging the gap withthem and being more engaged with them. News reporters need to be on the ground floor of this, instead of when the horse has left the barn."Twitter can also be a kind of community organizing tool for the newsroom itself. When big stories have broken, a few news organizations have channeled the freewheeling exchanges and debates that explode allover Twitter by creating their own hashtags. A day before the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages in the state, the Des Moines Register created its own hashtag, #iagaymarriage. The tagquickly caught on, becoming so popular that competitors like the Gazette in Cedar Rapids wound uptagging their tweets with it. The Register posted excerpts of some of the resulting discussion, turning it intothe 21st century equivalent of the classic man-on-the-street opinion feature. The Herald in Everett,Washington, did something similar earlier this year when its region was flooded; the paper's #wafloodhashtag became the go-to code for bulletins affecting the community and a rich source of news andreactions for the Herald.
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ashtags are just one of the tools that bring coherence to what can seem like Twitter's tower of Babel.Sites such asTweetcloud.comandTwitscoop.com, which track the hottest topics on Twitter, are like police
scanners for social media networks. They offer a real-time glimpse into what people, or people on Twitter anyway, are buzzing about (admittedly, most of the buzz is fairly predictable, such as chatter about theday's big game, or Cinco de Mayo on May 5).Tweetmeme.comeven shows the most popular links that people on Twitter have posted, another trick Google hasn't learned yet.The process works the other way, too; search engines like twist.flaptor.com and Twitter's ownsearch.twitter.com make it possible to search Twitter's collected musings on just about any topic. It's truethat the searches more often turn up haystacks of gibberish instead of gems, but it can also be a way to find breaking news."Two or three years ago, I would have said RSS feeds were the best way to keep track of a topic. I nowthink Twitter is better," says < a href='http://twitter.com/markbriggs'> Mark Briggs, who runs a softwaredevelopment company and is the author of "Journalism 2.0," a book about new digital reporting methods.Briggs, who tweets three or four times a day, tries to observe an 80-20 rule: about 80 percent of his tweets
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