A little bird told me
“Within a couple of minutes of the first of several bomb explosions in Jaipur, Tweetscan helped me find an eyewitness who was tweeting as he searched for his mother and dodged bombs exploding as close as 20 feet away,” says the BBC’s Robin Hamman of his search for eyewitnesses when a series of bombs exploded in Jaipur, the capital of northern Indian state of Rajasthan.
He is talking about the micro-blogging tool Twitter. The free service allows users to send messages of up to 140 characters from a mobile phone or via the internet. Messages are stored on the web. Users can “follow” each other and can choose to make messages public — which means anyone can search for them by keyword and location. Twitter defines itself as the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
In the case of Jaipur, Robin Hamman used a service called Tweetscan.com to look for any possible eyewitnesses on the ground. And he found one: “Just heard a big blast near badi chowpak. Donno what it was.” Twitter user Sandil Srinivasan was in Jaipur when the first in the series of nine synchronised bombs exploded.
But what does this mean for journalists? Within Twitter there lies a potential gold mine for those in search of eyewitness sources, but the service does have limitations.
Twitter, and similar services like Pownce and Jaiku, are not yet mainstream. As of March, the technology blog TechCrunch estimated there were over a million Twitter users worldwide with 200,000 active users per week publishing a total of three million tweets per day. Even 10 Downing Street sends out tweets and now has around 3,000 followers.
Big media outlets like the BBC and New York Times feed their news stories into Twitter using services like Twitterfeed.com.
But how will this affect UK newsrooms where Twitter is already in use in some and where managements are bound to try to add it to the growing list of new media task being piled on reporters? Should all journalists be tweeting on top of everything else they have to do? Well, yes and no. One of the beauties of Twitter — if it’s used wisely — is that it does not require a great deal of time. And searching Twitter for sources takes seconds. Websites offer locality or keyword searches. In May, freelance Gary Andrews tracked a explosion in Exeter through Twitter.
But Twitter has its limitations. It is still a niche tool and the user base is largely limited to the USA, Western Europe and Japan. Alex Strick van Linschoten who is based in Kabul says he is one of only two Twitter users in Afghanistan. It is also plagued by intermittent service outages.
Twitter is but one service in a growing range of popular social media tools that many journalists are ignorant or dismissive of, but which are here to stay and can, on occasion, make a journalist’s job all the more easier and rewarding.
Graham Holliday is digital media editor at the Frontline Club
www.frontlineclub.com