Is Twitter now the place for breaking news?

I learned this morning –via Twitter– that the Edward R. Murrow Awards will be announced this morning (11Eastern)… on Twitter. One of our company websites won a Murrow award a few years back and it’s kind of a big deal.

The awards are presented by RTNDA, which used to stand for Radio-Television News Directors Association. And may still. But the association now refers to itself as “The Association of Electronic Journalists.” A good move.

Choosing to announce their annual awards on Twitter speaks volumes. I salute the “AEJ” for recognizing and using this tool.

TED Talk: Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

From the TED Blog: “NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.” [via @greatdismal]

“The revolution will be Twittered”

“As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here’s the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:

ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.” — Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish

Video fastest-growing media platform in history

So says a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed. From story at MediaPost.com:

“In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online — as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network — according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. active Web users ages 16-65. What’s more, with 72% of U.S. Web users watching clips online, Web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform.”

The “broadcast mode is dead,” said Tom Smith, managing director of Trendstream. “Now is the time for co-creation, user distribution and a true democratization of video content.”

And the new video-ready iPhone will just accelerate this trend. (via @malloryglosier)

Twitter in sports about message control

“Twitter lets athletes speak on their own terms. “It’s going to be useful during the season, because after a game, I’ll be able to say my piece instead of just allowing different media outlets to portray me how they want to portray me,” said St. Louis Rams running back Steven Jackson, one of football’s prolific tweeters. Talk to any athlete or coach about the benefits of Twitter, and they’ll put message control at the top of the list. “In this world we live in now, everybody becomes media,” said Shaquille O’Neal, whose enormous following of more than 1 million has fueled Twitter fever in sports. “If something is going to be said, hey, it’s coming from me, it’s coming from my phone.” Journalists may lament athletes passing over the middle men. But honestly, what’s more interesting, a “we gave 110 percent” from the postgame podium, or a tweet like this from Shaq: “Dam manny ramirez, come on man Agggggggggh, agggggggh, agggggh.” — SI.com

 

“How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”

That’s the title of an article by Steven Johnson in this week’s Time Magazine. Here are a few snippets:

  • “This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.”
  • “Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network.”
  • “It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night’s date. Now you’re compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people’s lives.”

But the real money-shot of the piece (at least for me) is Johnson’s prediction (is it still a prediction if it’s already happening?) on Twitter’s influence on advertising.

“Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer’s eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.”

This is the best thing I’ve read on Twitter to date.

The unbundled media world

I’ve been doing some work on the website of one of our networks and came across a story about what appears to be a big music festival. I exchanged some emails with the news director about linking and adding content from other sources (Google, flickr, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, etc). She expressed some concerns about this.

She, like some many veteran reporters I know, seemed to be coming from that place where you write your story (with audio/video/stills) and it goes into whatever distribution channel your company happens to own: paper, magazine, radio/TV station. That’s where her “audience” finds the story.

And it worked just fine for a long time. But then the web comes along and most of us clapped our hands because we saw it as just one more way to reach “our” audience. A one-way pipe from which they would “consume our content.”

From a recent post (“The Web’s Widening Stream”) by Terry Heaton:

“The “Browse” phase of the Web was its first, and it’s where the name of the desktop application known as the browser originated. The Web was seen as a series of roads leading to destinations, We hopped from site to site — or in the case of AOL, destinations within the site — and everybody was happy. “Visitors” to sites were welcomed through a front door, which became the most valuable online real estate in terms of advertising.

“Search” disrupted the paradigm by allowing people to access documents within a site without going through that front door. We were still visiting sites, though, because that’s “where” the content resided. Search destroyed the value of the home page, and also allowed for advertising adjacent to search results — a way of monetizing content that existed only in link form on the pages of the search. If you wanted to buy ads next to football content, you didn’t need to buy football pages, for example. You could simply buy ads on search results for football.

“Subscribe” blew everything apart, because users no longer had to even visit websites, assuming publishers were willing to make their content available in RSS form. Most major publishers refused to play the game, so media company RSS feeds have generally contained only a sentence or two, thereby forcing users back to the site of origin, where publishers can monetize pages. This irritating practice has kept publishers from exploring revenue possibilities in a truly subscriber-based environment, and it’s the key thing holding back the development of RSS.

But a new paradigm is threatening all of the others and will eventually force all publishers into the unbundled media world. The staggering popularity of social media messaging via Facebook and MySpace “status updates” and, of course, Twitter is creating an information ecosystem that is a series of real-time streams. These streams come in short bursts, but when added to the RSS of Microsoft’s “subscribe” phase of the Web, they form powerful, relevant and meaningful sources of knowledge and information for an increasingly networked world.

Mr. Heaton quotes (and links to) VC John Borthwick who views “streams” as the new metaphor for the web:

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe are a part of this flow.

And then there is the advertiser:

“Advertising will be another fundamental part of the stream, but the rub for media companies is that advertisers can enter the stream themselves, without the assistance of being attached to media content. This is the inevitable end of a truly unbundled media world.”

If I started this post with a point in mind, I lost it along the way. I think it had something to do with the notion that a reporter –any reporter– could write/produce a story and expect others to find it and read it (and comment on it?) without being connected to them in some synchronous manner.

Or perhaps: All of us can tell the story better than any of us.

Whatever. Read Mr. Heaton’s piece.

“creativity thrives on constraints”

The always insightful Amy Gahran poses a little thought experiment that I believe I’ve posted on a few times:

“What if social media (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Google Earth, etc.) were the only tool you could use to deliver the benefits of journalism to your community? You could still gather information however you choose (through in-person interviews, phone, Web, archive research, etc. — even social media), but you could only deliver your work via social media. How would you do it?”

I suspect this experiment is already out of the lab and we’ll see more and more examples. And I especially like the notion that “creativity thrives on constraints.” 140 characters. 30 sec of video. Boiling a story down to its essence.

Twitter coverage of execution

Missourinet (a Learfield network) News Director Bob Priddy covered last night’s execution of Dennis Skillicorn. Reporters and witnesses can’t take cell phones past a certain point, but Bob was planning to use Twitter to file updates before and after the execution (he was a witness).

The wifi he expected wasn’t available so he took notes and posted to @missourinet when he got back on line (at the motel, I assume).

As I expected, Twitter was a very effective tool in the hands of good and experienced reporters. Here’s a screen shot from early this morning.

 

Had reporters been allowed to keep their Blackberrys and iPhones, this is probably as close to live coverage of an execution as we’re likely to get.

And in the hands of someone as responsible as Bob Priddy, I think this might be a good idea. As I understand it, the rationale behind having witnesses is to insure the people of Missouri “see” this ultimate punishment. Twitter might be the least sensational way to accomplish this on a mass scale.

I’ll make a prediciton here: If not in Missouri, some state will allow or provide this coverage.

TweetSpin: “set it and forget it”

TweetSpin, a new Twitter application designed by a radio programmer named Rico Garcia. Among other info, TweetSpin can post "now playing" data from a station's website.

Here's a couple of snippets from a review in R&R, a radio trade publication:

From KHOP PD MoJo Roberts: "TweetSpin allows us to constantly have 'what's playing now' on our status and set appointment tweets to go out so we can set it and forget it."

In addition the "now playing" feature, Garcia is more excited about built-in scheduling that allows stations to set up hourly, daily or weekly messages to encourage listening appointments.

Hardly surprising that an industry in the process of automating itself out of existence would look for a way to automate social media, too. Of course, if there's really no one at the station…