Taking Twitter reporting to the edge September 16, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, reporting , add a commentThe latest reporting use of Twitter that’s caught my eye is to cover a funeral, as undertaken (wordplay intended) by the Rocky Mountain News.
I make it 28 Tweets in just over 90 minutes — “pallbearers carry out coffin followed by mourners”, “people are viewing the body, which is lying in casket with teddy bear. some people falling on knees to pray”, for example. The texts are reproduced in one of the comments on the article linked above (no direct link; scroll down to the tenth comment).
Most of the comments are negative, perhaps not surprisingly — as was Michelle Ferrier on the Poynter blog.
More journalists seem to have been experimenting with Twitter over the last year or so. Paul Bradshaw provided a useful overview on his Online Journalism Blog and Jeff Jarvis weighed in here. It was only a question of time before theses on Twitter started to appear…
Geographic news filter goes live: Holovaty’s EveryBlock January 24, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, Online, USA, database, hyperlocal, reporting , add a commentFascinating to see EveryBlock up and running, filtering material from databases, news articles, Flickr, blogs etc by neighbourhood and zip code. It launched yesterday for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. From my first quick look, building permits, crime reports and Flickr photos seem to dominate coverage of some areas.
In their launch announcement, Adrian Holovaty and the team make clear they see this as news:
We like to toss around the word “news” to describe all of this, and that might surprise you at first. Isn’t news what appears on the front page of the New York Times? Isn’t news something produced by professional journalists?
Well, it can be — and we include as much of that on EveryBlock as possible. But, in our minds, “news” at the neighborhood or block level means a lot more. On EveryBlock, “Somebody reviewed the new Italian restaurant down the street on Yelp” is news. “Somebody took a photo of that cool house on your block and posted it to Flickr” is news. “The NYPD posted its weekly crime report for your neighborhood” is news. If it’s in your neighborhood and it happened recently, it’s news on EveryBlock.
Online tools aid coverage of Heathrow crash January 23, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, Research, reporting , add a commentGoogle, YouTube, Wikipedia and a flight simulator PC game helped Rory Cellan-Jones cover this story for the BBC. Responding to comments on this blog post, he emphasises that:
I’m talking about extra help from technology, but that does not mean the old-fashioned journalistic skills go out of the window
Cellan-Jones then goes on to argue that:
We tend to romanticise the good old days when a journalist had nothing but a notebook, some decent contacts, and a plausible manner, but I think the competition is more intense now. My point is that the instant access to information and pictures makes every story move far more quickly. If you refuse to use the new tools – as well as the old ones – then you will be left behind.
Well said, whether directed to established reporters or student journalists.