Journalism

I just discovered Tweetscan, which is a cool little service that aggregates Twitter posts for user-selected topics. You can go to the site and type in a search term, then see recent tweets (that’s what you call Twitter posts) that include your term.

Jeff Jarvis noted this over the weekend and used the example of a spring snowstorm that was disrupting travel at London’s Gatwick airport. Tweetscan’s search of “Gatwick” turned up lots of tweets by people stranded and bored at the airport, posting to Twitter from their laptops or cell phones.

What a nice journalistic tool! Next time you’re covering something that can be tracked with a common term, search Tweetscan and you may find eyewitnesses’ accounts. You can contact these people via Twitter for follow-ups. Sweet tweets!

Did you see the Brodeur survey of journalists released the other day? “Brodeur Journalists Survey Identifies Blogs’ Influence on Traditional News Coverage.”

Flipping through the PDF version of the report, my jaw dropped when I saw this slide:

One in four journalist blogs. One in five has a page on a social network. Good grief, Charlie Brown!

The audience is marching online, in many cases switching allegiances to online and digital, or at least adding significant digital consumption to their media diets at the expense of traditional formats, and most journalists don’t move with them. News professionals can’t understand the transformation in media consumption if they don’t live it themselves. I think every journalist should blog, maintain pages on social networking sites, use new media-related websites (Twitter, Digg, et al), etc. (Just follow Howard Owens’ advice.)

It’s 2008, folks. My young daughters, apparently, are more attuned to the media reality than three-quarters of journalists. Do you expect to be relevant to them when they become adults if you don’t live in their world?

When I see stuff like this, I sometimes wonder if there’s hope for the news industry.

(Of course, I bet lots of people will look at the numbers above and think that it shows progress. Sure, some. But take a gander at recent headlines over at Romenesko, where hardly a day goes by that one or more of them aren’t about yet more newspaper layoffs. Journalists are not adapting fast enough to help their organizations make the necessary transformation to doing business in the Internet era. It’s not all the responsibility of those in the executive offices.)

Oh, and while my inner critic is letting loose, I’ll point out to Brodeur that the chart is confusing; a pie chart is not the correct graphic device to present the information above. (What can I say… I once was a newspaper graphics editor.) Pie charts can’t be used when multiple answers are possible, such as with the question above.

Here’s yet another Twitter+journalism idea, via PBS MediaShift: Twitter posses.

As J.D. Lasica explains, the concept is to have reporters begin using the immediacy and interactivity of Twitter: “A beat reporter could enlist a dozen or two dozen passionate, driven readers to serve as a kind of Twitter posse. Whenever she was about to tackle a big story or difficult interview, the reporter could begin a mobile dialogue with her posse members, who could pose questions, much like the ‘backchannel’ IRC feed at conferences such as AlwaysOn or Supernova.”

This is a faster version of “beat blogging,” the idea of journalists using social networking tools to assemble a group of experts in a topic to assist and advise them and improve the depth of their reporting.

I can’t help but love how journalists are embracing these new online tools as they appear. For lots of people, their first reaction to Twitter was, “That’s frivolous.” (I’ll admit it; I thought that initially, too.) But fairly quickly folks started thinking outside the box.

Dan Gillmor is gearing up for his new position as inaugural leader of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University, starting next year. Over on the Center for Citizen Media blog, he blogs about the planning process for getting the new center going.

He writes: “The most important thing is simple: This is a time of incredible opportunity in media, and entrepreneurial thinking is absolutely key to the future of journalism. Much of the worry in the traditional organizations is well warranted, given the implosion of their business models, but even there I’m seeing plenty of creativity spawned by the realization that what worked, business-wise, in the past is at best unlikely to work in the future due to the end of the monopoly and oligopoly eras of news. Meanwhile, activists and entrepreneurs are seizing the chance to make a difference when it counts. Everywhere I go, I talk with people of all ages who have great-sounding ideas about media projects. The major question remains, how do we make these things sustainable?”

Gillmor is (as usual) at the right place in the grand scheme of things. This is exactly what the news industry needs. I totally buy into the notion that entrepreneurial thinking is what will “save journalism.” As old business models become unsustainable, traditional news organizations must be much more open to entrepreneurial thinking — and fund new business operations that well may hasten the inevitable demise of their former cash cows.

Of course, much of the new news initiatives will come from entrepreneurs with no formal links to traditional news organizations. I’m hoping we’ll see a wave of those in the next couple years (after which, of course, they’ll likely get acquired by news companies looking to save themselves).