FutureTwitter is the most popular microblogging service. With 313 milion active users and aproximately 500 milion tweets per day (check out how many tweets are being sent every day), it was launched in 2006 as a short, text-based communication social network.
As the journalist Mark Briggs points out, “in the past, a user had to wait for a news organization to publish a story on a breaking news event”. However, he says, “with Twitter, users on the scene start spreading the word immediately”. Its simplicity and flexibility -we can send tweets with images, videos, GIFs and links- has turned Twitter into the favorite social network for media companies. Nowadays, if you are a media outlet and you are not on Twitter, you will be deemed old-fashioned.
Making the most of Twitter is not just about attaching the link of the same stories that are available on the website. Using Twitter as a place to pour links prevents media from engaging in the community conversation, which is one of the main purposes of this social media. Tweeting entails asking for feedback, getting to know your audience and paying attention to what your followers say. “If I send out a link it’s because I did it myself”, says Tracy Record, founder of the West Seattle Blog. This is how Twitter works, we have to be a human presence and publish only our own material. In order words, turning off the autopilot.
The coverage of breaking events is thought to be the primary use of the social network represented by the blue bird. Almost every unexpected news, such as terrorist attacks or accidents, are first released on Twitter. Thus, citizens are no longer viewers and have become also publishers. This is one of the keys of current journalism. Not only journalists, but also people take part in the news production. And journalists have to pay attention to that and take advantage of this new concept of citizen journalism.
A ground-breaking newspaper
The New York Times is a great example of a newspaper that has adapted perfectly to the requirements of the new journalism (still evolving). A Twitter-based multimedia world compels outlets to create a wide range of contents. Printed papers are no longer enough. They have to exploit their websites, their social media accounts and complement the reports with blogs that go into details in some specific topics.
The American newspaper is one of the most up-to-date media. If you look up “the new york times” on Google, the first result will be “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia“. I would bet that the last word -Multimedia- was not there some years ago. Indeed, multimedia content, essentially videos, is one of the strengths of the daily newspaper. There is no doubt that The New York Times reporters strive very hard in order to enhance and stand out the multimedia world. This is how the “Times Video” interface looks like:
Try to find a media with no Twitter account. That seems like a hard challenge to fullfil. Every newspaper and media company has at least one account on Twitter. Being on this social network is a must for those that base their work on producing and publishing news. Some of them even have different accounts for each field of information or each edition.
The New York Times is an enormous newspaper with more than 750 members on a Twitter list called NYT Journalists. Its Twitter feed has a great deal of traffic every day. The vast majority of tweets include the headline of a story, with the link to the website and the pertinent picture. The journalists that work for The NYT also have their personal accounts, which they use to share or retweet stories, quote and comment others tweets and post thoughts. Emma Cott and Samantha Stark, for example, are reporters for the American newspaper. Both of them, as we can see from the embedded tweets, use their personal accounts to publish thoughts and concerns, but essentially to attach and recommend content available on the newspaper they work for.
A Catalan in NYC 