How We Use Twitter for Journalism

How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we've been leveraging Twitter heavily for some of our most important news writing. While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we've got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the microblogging medium.

Josh Catone wrote here in January about the rise of Twitter as a platform for serious discourse and discussed the way that a handful of mainstream journalists are using the tool. Charles Cooper did an informal survey earlier this month that found a definite majority of journalists old and new to be absent from Twitter.

I did an interview on the BBC last week with some traditional journalists about Twitter and they scoffed at the idea that it could be useful. "Well," one said after I talked about how we've used it, "I certainly won't be checking it out." Hmph!

The scoffers can scoff all they want, but here at RWW our use of Twitter so far has included:


the discovery of breaking stories,

performing interviews,

quality assurance

and promotion of our work.


Breaking News
One of the defining characteristics of Twitter is its ease of use. While getting engaged enough to find value in the service does require some initial investment of time and energy - on a day to day and minute by minute basis, Twitter is remarkably easy to post to. As a result, people often post things they discover to Twitter before or instead of posting it to a blog.

Whether it's natural disasters, political developments or breaking tech news - it's common to discover items of interest first on Twitter.

Robert Scoble wrote a year ago about how Twitter users reported a major earthquake in Mexico City several minutes before the USGS did. Zolie Erdos chronicled last month how Twitter users beat government agencies and the world's (formerly) leading news organizations in reporting on March earthquakes in both China and Japan.

We discover tech news tips on Twitter first on a regular basis. When Google bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, for example, we learned about it on Twitter. That early news tip lead to our covering the news before any one else and getting our story on the front page of Digg - good in this case for tens of thousands of pageviews.

Interviews
When we got to interview Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW this year, we solicited interview questions via Twitter. If was quickly evident that many people wanted to read his thoughts about data portability, but we got some other good question suggestions as well. That's becoming an increasingly common tactic for us and other writers, as it's so easy to supplement our own questions with those of a larger network.