FEATURE Twitter news

Twitter news FEATURE

HOW TWITTERS BREAKING THE NEWS

Newspaper and television news crews are increasingly losing out to social media. Barry Collins investigates how Twitter is setting, shaping and breaking the news

ngerclean off Feds didnt pet to just takehim out!! Meanwhile, the detail-free BBC report remains largely unchanged at the top of the site,its editors clearly aware that a major, horrifying incident is taking place but hamstrung by the (arguably admirable) requirement to double-check facts before reporting them to the world. And so the BBC continues to run an incongruous-looking but factually correct story at the top of the site, while anyone with a Twitter account is following the gruesome commentary fromthoseat the scene. Before the BBC or any other broadcaster hastime to get a camera crew to the scene, apasser-by uses his smartphone to record anextraordinary monologue by one of the alleged attackers, whos gripping what appears to be a meat clever in his bloodied hands. Traditional media uses its last remaining trump card money to acquire the footage, with ITV News claiming the exclusive rights to the video forits early evening broadcast, but this is undoubtedly an event where Twitter and so-called citizen journalists have outshone the professionals. And its by no means the rst. The Arab Spring, the London riots, the Boston bombings these are all major events where Twitter and social media have set the news agenda. But what impact is this rush of amateur news reporting having on the news itself? How do broadcasters and newspapers compete when theyre beaten to almost every major incident by a hundred bystanders with smartphones? And is it now the case that the news professionals are copying the amateurs, andnotthe other way round?

Boston bombings

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ts 2.30pm on 22 May, and at the top ofthe BBC News website is a brief story about a man being attacked in the street in Woolwich, south London. The story is remarkable for its ordinariness: aman has been the victim of an assault outside an army barracks and police are attending the scene, the BBC reports. Street crime in south London isnt exactly rare. It wouldnt usually make the front page of the local newspaper, let alone the top of the BBC News website. What the hell is going on?

The real story is breaking on Twitter, and hell isnt an entirely inaccurate description as a local musician out buying fruit and veg suddenly becomes a frontline reporter. Ohhhhh myyyy God!!!! I just see a man with his head chopped off right in front of my eyes! tweets @Boyadee, in a message thats rapidly retweeted tens of thousands of times. Oh my God!!!! The way Feds took them out!!! It was a female police ofcer she come

out the whip and just started bussssin shots!! His reporting style is some way from the BBC style guide, but hes got everyones attention. The rst guy goes for the female fed with the machete and she not even ramping she took man out like robocop never seen nutn like it. Then the next breda try buss off the rusty45 and it just backres and blows mans

The bombings at the Boston Marathon earlier this year offereda prime illustration of socialmedia at its unmatchable best and its appalling worst when it comes to coveringmajor news stories. Although television broadcasters and newspapers were already at the scene to cover the marathon, themost illuminating early reports of the attackemerged from Twitter. Almost immediately after the rst blast, eyewitnesses began to describe and photograph the incident. A map created after the event recorded more than half a million individual tweets about the attack from within the Bostonarea in the following three hours. Twitters echo chamber effect saw those earlytweets rebound around the world millionsof times, giving distant observers a handful of accounts to latch on to for live updates while news crews hurried to the scene. Traditional media outlets were immediately on the back foot, and were receiving their updates from Twitter like the rest of us. People switching on the TV to watch the news unfold were disappointed to nd broadcasters lagging behind what they were reading on their PCs and smartphones. Even The Boston Globe which had no excuse for not having reporters on the scene temporarily handed over its homepage to a live Twitter feed, retweeting messages from eyewitnesses and the emergency services instead of its own reporters. The BBC came in for particularly heavy criticism a few days later, as many people accused it of being slow to identify the chief suspects, and disparaged its cautiousreporting ofthe armed manhunt for them. While Twitter was ablaze with gripping eyewitness accounts ofthe armed siege taking place in Boston,
The Woolwich murder was reported live by a Twitter user

New Statesman described the hunt for the Boston bomber as a racist Wheres Wally

BBCradio and television reports were, once again, one step behind. The BBC is in an unusual position in thatithas more platforms than any other journalistic organisation I know, wrote Charlie Beckett, founding director of the POLISjournalism think-tank at the London School of Economics, about its coverage of theBoston bombings manhunt. It also has adeliberate policy of verication rather than justspeculation or narration. So despite an excellent newsroom social media operation, itisalways going to feel slightly behind on stories like this. If the BBC was showing deliberate caution,it wasnt without good cause. In theimmediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, users of sitessuch as Twitter, Facebook and, in particular, reddit pored overphotos and videofootage of the scene shortly before the attack in a bid to try and crowdsource the identity of the attackers. New Statesman described the process as a racist Wheres Wally, with the sites largely attempting to identify non-white males carryingrucksacks. reddit users xed on one suspect inparticular, 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi, whohadbeen missing since March. Many broadcasters, newspapers and websites keennot to cede any more ground to the social-networking news machine either namedTripathi as a suspect or hinted at hisidentity.They were, of course, wrong, andreddit issued a public apology, admitting that ithad fuelled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation [that] spiralled into verynegative consequences for innocent parties. Those consequences initially seemedvery severe when Tripathis body was discovered in a river only days later, although itappears that his death was unrelated to himbeing identied as a suspect.

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FEATURE Twitter news

Twitter news FEATURE

If you cant beat em

Despite its aws, Twitter and social media have clearly had a disruptive effect on newsrooms. Indeed, the journalistic instinct to relay news asquickly as possible means most television and newspaper reporters are now breaking news on Twitter before their own websites, irrespective of the potential commercial harm itmight do to their titles. After all, tweets earn apublisher precisely no revenue. Twitter has also changed the way news isreported. Before 2010, court reporting largelyconsisted of reporters jotting down shorthand notes and rushing outside the courtroom to relay them to the TV cameras orle reports for their website. In December 2010, however, the lord chief justice ruled thatthe use of an unobtrusive, handheld, virtually silent piece of modern equipment forthe purposes of simultaneous reporting ofproceedings to the outside world as they unfoldin court is unlikely to interfere with theproper administration of justice. Reporters now routinely tweet from the press gallery, providing the rst real-time coverage of court proceedings in

Live tweeting has become a staple for mainstream media

A Sky journalists impromptu iPhone video of the London riots became a dening report

With court reporting, its critical todeliver exact quotations, not paraphrases, Thomasadded. Thatdoesnt tend towork on Twitter, which requires you to be succinct. On occasion we found that, where a headline quote emerged, we had to follow up, letting the news desk andthe website know precisely which words came from the barrister and which from the twittering broadcaster. Court reporters arent the only journalists embracing Twitter. Sports reporters routinely tweet live updates from matches and quotes from pre- and post-match press conferences. Any major tech announcement is live-tweeted by dozens of websites, including PC Pro. Breaking news stories often appear on Twitter rst, thanks largely to the services ease of use and immediacy a reporter need only tap a few words into their phone and press Send, rather than log in to a content management system, llout the required elds and wait for an editor orsub-editor to read their work. This desire to breaknews as quickly as possible on Twitter has given rise to some interesting internal conicts. The BBC sparked a mini furore in media circles in 2012 when it issued guidance to reporters, stating that our rst priority remains ensuring that important information reaches Reporters for the mainstream news have had to embrace Twitter BBC colleagues, and thus allour audiences, as quickly as possible and certainly not after the history of British justice. Its an enormous itreaches Twitter. responsibility for the courtroom reporters, The guidance was interpreted perhaps, whomust continue to ensure that their notunreasonably as an edict that journalists tweetsdont interfere with justice and report shouldnt break stories on Twitter, forcing whatsbeing said accurately within the limits theBBC to issue a clarication on its of140characters, as well as performing their EditorsBlog a day later. To clarify any regularreporting jobs. There is a danger when misconceptions, this guidance isnt about writingnotes, thinking about scripts and texting tellingBBC journalists not to break stories tweetsthat you will miss the subtleties of legal onTwitter, the update read. Its about argument; the way that a line of questioning making sure stories are broken as quickly and isbeing developed, wrote the BBCs Philippa efciently as possible to our large audiences Thomas after her rst attempt at courtroom ona wide range of platforms Twitter, other tweeting during the Stephen Lawrence murder social networks, our own website, continuous trial in 2012. There are pitfalls for journalists TV and radio news channels, TV and radio in trying to do too much and failing to do bulletins and programmes across several anything properly the common lament networks. Clear as mud, then. ofourmultitasking, multimedia age.

YouTube reporting

Twitter isnt the only social media service being used to break news. YouTube has become another crucial channel for journalists, even those who have their own television news channel and camera crews to call on. During the London riots in 2012, Skys Mark Stone found himself among looters who were brazenly ransacking shops in Clapham. Instead of waiting for a Sky camera crew to arrive in south London and risk the looters dispersing, or scaring them off with the prospect of having their faces splashed all overnational television, Stone shed his iPhoneout of his pocket and began recording what he saw. Stones report was extraordinary for two reasons: the footage of youths breakinginto shops and walking out unchallenged with whatever they could nd was shocking in its own right, but even more extraordinary was the way Stone walked up tothe looters and called them to account for their actions, more in the style of an angry resident than an impassive observer. Are you proud of what youre doing? Stone yells at looters, emerging from a branch of Currys Digital with huge boxes in their hands. Stealing stuff, whats that about? In fact, when asked if hes a journalist by another looter, Stone replies, No, I live here, Im just astounded at what youre doing. And so a piece of citizen journalism with its shaky video, amateur production values and rough-and-ready style of questioning became one of the dening television broadcastsof the riots, with Stone acclaimedasone of its heroes.

press statements and interviews ltered through press ofcers or agents are particularly forthcoming. Footballers have even been nedand banned for bringing the game into disrepute after tweeting indiscrete comments that have ended up all over the media. It isnt always newspapers shaming celebrities via social media; sometimes its the other way round. Actress Evan Rachel Wood used Twitter to lambast the Daily Mail website after it published pictures of her unborn baby without her permission. She was photographed by paparazzi as she left an LA hospital holding

her latest ultrasound picture. Thats my child, Wood tweeted. Its not even out of the womb and they are snapping photos of it. I have never been more violated by a photographer. The Daily Mail subsequently removed the story from its website, seemingly without apology. As well as photos of celebrities unborn babies, newspapers and broadcasters seem to have little compunction about republishing any photo or video they nd on a social media site without seeking the owners permission. There have been numerous cases of photographers complaining that their photos were stolen bynewspapers. In 2010, for example, photographer Emily James posted a photo ofaprotest at a British polling station using Twitpic, which subsequently appeared without her prior knowledge on several national newspaper websites. The Times and The Guardian subsequently apologised and paid James compensation for the photos, according to reports. But when she invoiced the Daily Mail website
Actress Evan Rachel Wood used Twitter to complain of intrusion

The press dont always seek permission to use images from social media sites

for the photos it published without permission, she received an email from the picture editor informing her we cannot pay the amount you have requested [1,190 for three photos] because these images were taken from TwitPic and therefore placed in the public domain. The picture editor reportedly offered her only 40 per image, but later agreed to pay more. Twitter may have stolen the medias thunder, but the medias certainly getting something back in return.

GRAPHIC PHOTOS: IS SOCIAL MEDIA MOVING BOUNDARIES?

Newspaper picture editors have always tried to strike a delicate balance between powerful photographs and those that are too graphic for a family audience. Twitter, on the other hand, has no such self-censorship. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, several images of victims with limbs missing were circulated, often without any warning ofthe graphic photos behind the link. Newspaper picture desks were offered many similar images by photographers after the London bombings in 2005, but those never

Agenda setting

Traditional news outlets dont only take style cues from social media, they take stories too. Tabloid and middle-market newspapers have staff dedicated to monitoring the Twitter feeds and Facebook proles of celebrities and other public gures, in case they say anything newsworthy or post a revealing photo. Sports stars who would previously have had their

made it into circulation: most were rejected by picture editors, and a lack of high-resolution camera phones and social media sites (Twitter wasnt formed until 2006) meant they didnt appear online, either. Yet almost every newspaper ran with front-page photos of the Woolwich murder suspect grasping a bloody cleaver in his hand all screengrabbed from that passer-bys smartphone video. Are newspaper editors and their readers being desensitised by graphic photos on social media? Are newspapers willing to take greater risks with photos, through fear of losing out to Twitter and its like? I think papers are still quite squeamish about showing violence and gore, a senior member of a national newspapers photo desk told PC Pro. The Woolwich killing was an exception, and it will be interesting to see if it changes attitudes. I think the cleaver image was used widely because it

was out there, and all over social media and TV. It was also the only image for the story there wasnt a softer way of illustrating it. When covering stories such as Syria orthe Bangladesh clothing factory collapse, we were very careful not to show pictures that were too graphic. A few days after Bangladesh we found a set of pictures by[Bangladesh-based photographer] TaslimaAkhter that showed bodies in the rubble. The pictures were powerful, but after a long, very intense discussion between the picture editor and foreign editor, it was decided not to run them. I thought we were insane at the time, but having discussed it with friends over the days after, I suspect we were right not to publish them as everyone told me that it would have put them off reading the piece. The pictures have been run in print since, but they have appeared online much more extensively.

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