Twitter to news

MU’s own Jen Reeves, one of the most innovative minds here when it comes to journalism and social media, likes to compare the journalistic value of Twitter to a police scanner. When news sources use Twitter to follow the feeds of people in their community, they can glean what is going on in communities similar to what we have in newsrooms now, where police scanners are a window into what’s going on in the police and fire arenas.

Today I was part of a beautiful example of how it works.

My wife and I were walking across the MU campus today and I remarked how it smelled like burning wood, sort of like that first winter day when everyone in town fires up the fireplace. Soon we saw random pieces of ash-like material floating to the ground every so often. It was obvious that something was burning somewhere in Columbia.

We had seen nothing on the news, and when I got to my office I immediately checked the Missourian, Daily Tribune, and KOMU to see if there was anything going on.

Nothing.

The air quality was pretty bad at that point, so I posted the following to my Twitter feed:

Anyone know why it smells like wood burning all over campus and there’s ash coming down from the sky? I see nothing on the news.

Within a few minutes, I got an email from Joy Mayer at the Missourian, who follows my Twitter feed and had seen my tweet. She thanked me for the news tip and said the Missourian would have something shortly.

Mayer and Jake Sherlock went to work with the Missourian folks. Five minutes later, through their own Twitter account, the Missourian tweeted the following headline:

A.L. Gustin Golf Course is having a control burn until 1 p.m. today. Expect smoke, ash and burning odor in the area.

I retweeted the message and thus pushed it out to my own network of friends via Twitter and Facebook. Five minutes after that (and bear in mind, this is about 15 minutes after my original tweet), the Missourian posted a longer bulletin to their web site expanding on the information, including that they’d first heard the information from a “concerned citizen” on Twitter (that’s me, apparently) and provided confirmation that they’d verified the burn with MUPD dispatch.

So in 15-20 minutes, it went from citizen tweet to verified information on the Missourian web site. This is the anatomy of using social media to break citizen news in the age of Web 2.0. News outlets still feed the Web site as the ultimate destination, but the starting point comes from a stream of discussion, and in fact uses that stream of discussion to further push the content once it’s published.

This is the police scanner at work. Rather than listening to dispatch chatter for the cop or radio channels, news outlets can subscribe to a stream of chatter from citizens in their community and mine that data for news. While this was a minor piece of news in the scheme of things, imagine for a second the possibilities.

I hear all the time (and sometimes too often) that “this citizen journalism stuff” isn’t real news because it’s not trustworthy. Of course it’s not always trustworthy. That’s why we need professional journalism.

But Twitter and other social media sources of information present the same opportunity as a fire alarm or police scanner in that journalists can pick up bits of information, discern the news, make some calls, and push verified information into the stream of discussion for mass consumption. The principles set out in The Elements of Journalism don’t really change all that much: truth matters, and so do verification, independence, and talkback.

But the game itself has changed. This is not the journalist as agenda-setter. It is journalist as a hub connecting multitudes of spokes in the stream of civic discussion. It is this changing role that has a lot of my colleagues both in the industry and academy nervous.

To me, it’s a better evolution of stuff we already do, and it gives us a chance to do it better.

Update: An excellent blog post from Rob Weir at the Missourian gives you a look at the process from the Missourian side. My first reaction is that I’m reminded how even with all the technology in the world, it still takes journalists making decisions to make it all come together.