How BBC uses Twitter as a journalistic tool
"BBC News, Twitter and suits" by Darren Waters:
...in the past 24 months it is clear that Twitter has become another tool or conduit in our reporting. So how do we use it?
- Talking to and responding to queries from readers, fellow professionals and colleagues.
- Asking the audience questions and using the crowd as a source of information
- Reporting updates, breaking news, and giving colour and texture
- Pushing out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com
- Getting a very fast and very global sense of events
- Using hashtags to find viewpoints around breaking news as well as a source of user generated content
- Unifying different threads of reporting - news website, blog, Flickr etc
One of the biggest lessons I think we are beginning to learn from Twitter is in understanding the value of having a simple technology both to deliver and publish breaking news updates.Twitter excels in its ubiquity and simplicity across different platforms and reveals the value in delivering real-time, sequential updates around breaking news.