Last week we talked about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, about how citizen journalist accounts now formed a standard part of news media coverage of these sorts of events. I think I suggested that user generated content had become part of business as usual for the news media covering terrorism/natural disasters...
In fact, some people argued that Mumbai generated a low level of user generated content. Others talked about the attacks as the moment Twitter came of age as a journalistic tool. I've talked about Twitter before - it's a service that allows people to post short updates on what they're doing - a bit like the status updates on Facebook. You can choose to follow some people's updates. Others can choose to follow yours. You can only post short messages (or tweets) on Twitter - 140 characters is the max (without clever software add-ons). You can set up your mobile so you can text to Twitter.
It's become remarkably popular with journalists - who use it as a tool to ask sources questions or to post short updates. Increasingly ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events use it to post short eyewitness messages to the net.
Earlier this year, the online media guru Jeff Jarvis talked about the way Twitter got out the news of the Sichuan earthquake in China. This week he celebrated the way Twitter was used in Mumbai. Radio 4's Media Show had a good report this week on the same thing - I think I'll play it today in class.
If you want to sign up to Twitter, it's easy. I'm on it, though I haven't used it much in the last month... It might be worth playing around with it to see what you can do with it. The Guardian's specialist on new media culture, Jemima Kiss, uses it a lot, as part of her journalism. It might be worth following her tweets for a while. Paul Bradshaw has written an excellent guide on how journalists can master Twitter which is defintely worth checking out.
Comments