The media maker's guide to twitter

The journlist's guide to twitter

Leah Betancourt is the digital community manager at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn. She is @l3ahb3tan on Twitter.

Journalists are using Twitter to engage with their audience, connect with sources and continue building their personal brands.
The 140-character format forces writers to focus their attention and get to the point quickly. But this isn’t just sound-bite style reporting. I talked with some reporters about Twitter() and how they use it.

Twitter enhances reporting

Jason DeRusha, who’s @derushaj on Twitter, a reporter at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, uses Twitter daily as part of is his job. He started using it Aug. 2, 2007, the day after the 35W bridge collapse. He said in an e-mail interview that it lets him continue building his personal brand as a journalist.

DeRusha uses it specifically to crowdsource stories and promote his work. He does a segment called “Good Question” five nights a week in which Twitter plays a role.
He often puts his questions on Twitter at the start of the day, and then his followers (more than 2,200) help him come up with angles, or chime in with their opinions. Rather than interviewing random people on the street, he’s able to get more targeted feedback from people with relevant life experience.
DeRusha’s first Twitter success story was in late 2007. He was doing a story on December sniffles caused by allergies to Christmas trees. He used Twitter to find someone who was allergic to Christmas trees, who has to use heavy protective gloves to decorate theirs. He said he would never have found this source without Twitter.
John Dickerson (@jdickerson), Slate’s chief political correspondent and author of “On Her Trail,” has been using Twitter as part of his job since November 2007. He said in an e-mail interview that as a writer, he finds the voice he uses for Twitter is different than his normal voice. He said that he feels Twitter helps him think differently about how to communicate or perhaps just come up with a more clever line about something.
Dickerson learned from Twitter that people regularly confuse a fact that you report with advocacy for the fact you’re reporting. “So if you quote the president, they assume you approve of the quote. I know people did that, of course, but I’ve been surprised how much they respond that way to items I write on Twitter,” he said. “It’s reminded me that this is sentence structure, since a sentence is about all you get on Twitter.”

cf http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/twitter-journalism/