Twitter changing the face of news

By Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 29, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Ellen Jaskol / The Rocky

Curtis Gilbert, a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, takes photographs with his cell phone off a television in one of the Pepsi Center media tents. Gilbert was trying to get an image of Minn- esota congressional candidate Ashwin Madia for MPR's Web site. At left is reporter Tom Scheck.

News and celebrity sightings transmitted in one-sentence bursts from cell phones directly onto Web sites.

Raw video of protesters, delegates, political leaders, curiosity-seekers streamed onto the Internet from cell phones and low-cost video cameras.

The Democratic National Convention offered a microcosm of how technology is changing today's media. Perhaps most of all, it reflected the increasing marriage of new and traditional media, with the focus firmly on the Internet.

"It seems like a lot of news organizations were saying (about mobile streaming of content during the DNC), 'This is our project, and we're showing how it can be used,' " said Ellyn Angelotti, interactivity editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

One of the most popular tools used was Twitter, which enables users to send up to 140-word messages, or tweets, from their cell phones directly to the Web.

But there were lots of other examples.

Washington Post reporters sent live video streams from their BlackBerry phones. The Associated Press produced raw video footage, including Barack Obama's walk-through of Invesco Field at Mile High late Wednesday. Reuters gave a handful of Flip videocams to citizen journalists with Huffington Post's OfftheBus.

Many of the new media types posted raw video on their blogs and on their video-streaming sites such as youtube.com. And broadcast networks beefed up their Web site video reports, with some including unfiltered citizen journalism such as CNN.com's "iReport."

Experimentation often trumped concerns about quality, and there were plenty of examples of "Twitter faux pas" including trivial or goofy postings.

"Well-told stories - fundamental journalism - may be sacrificed a little with the Flip (video)cam era," Angelotti said of the trend to put raw video on news sites.

But all in all, "it feels like this has been a pretty engaging collective reporting project," she said of the media's efforts at the DNC.

Other watchdogs are closely tracking the new media trends.

Perspectv.com, for example, is collecting election-related tweets, blogs and mainstream news.

One number it's measuring: how often Barack Obama is mentioned versus John McCain. Obama naturally dominated the coverage this week because of the DNC - but more among the mainstream press than in the Blogosphere or via Twitter.

Journalists acknowledge they still are getting comfortable with the new tools.

That's even true for many in the new media.

Amanda Michel, director of the OfftheBus, which had five citizen journalists at the DNC, said this week the first instinct of her correspondents around the country is to take notes. She described video reporting as still being in an "experimental phase."

Michel echoed many mainstream editors today when she said there's little doubt the future will see increased use of the new tools. The quality of cell phone video also is improving, and additional streaming tools such as Qik and Radar are emerging.

The new tools, however, are most powerful as a complement to in-depth journalism, Angelotti said.

As much as she enjoyed reading tweets from the DNC this week, Angelotti said, "I really appreciated hearing the analysis on NPR (National Public Radio) every day (as well)."

smithje@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5155

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