My Haiku Sonnet

Nicholas Kristof: Pulitzer Prize Winner and CHAMPION OF TWITTER with Darfur rebels. From The Harvard Crimson

For anyone directed to this post from Twitter, I’m afraid it is not actually a sonnet made of haiku (the going rate for a real one of those is from me is, let’s say, 40 bucks)  but my title is simply a metaphor for blogging about Twitter.

For my Twitter-centric post this week, I want to expand on Journalism.co.uk’s list of the best examples of Twitter’s use for quality journalism written for Twitter’s fifth anniversary. That piece looked both at feeds which have been the most journalistically important as well as individual tweets which proved influential. I want to add to that list one more tweeter who does a good job not only of providing followers with quality information, but does so in ways appropriate to the medium: Nick Kristof.

It may be because he has been so close to so many of the key events in the wave of middle eastern protests, but the intrepid New York Times reporter/columnist is doing nothing less than redefining the role of the regular columnist in the internet age. Rather than saving his thoughts up for the day his column is due, he engages with his readers constantly while in the process of interpreting world events, allowing that debate to shape his conclusions.

I think the key to his tweets being interesting is that he divides them about equally into three categories: curating (RTing the most interesting news articles from major news sources and citizen journalists alike), first-person reporting (NK went wherever the news in the region was for a while, and  he of course has connections to newsmakers and leaders in many other regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa), and debate and engagement with his followers’ thoughts and criticisms (this can certainly not be said for many news sources/journalists on Twitter). He recently asked his followers to reflect on Twitter through Twitter, asking for Twitter haikus. One cynical but funny one from @treesofyavanna reads:

@NickKristof #twitterhaiku Twitter, five years in/News for the ADD set/Look, there’s Charlie Sheen!

Ironically, if I were to look for a journalistic entity that does not use Twitter effectively, I’d look no further than Kristof’s employer: The New York Times’ feed . Following the New York Times’ main feed is no different than subscribing to nytimes.com  on Google Reader. It’s just headlines and links (since they can’t all be posted, likely the same big stories every other news source will be tweeting at the same time) and there’s no interaction or curating or anything medium-specific going on at all.

When people just follow CNN, BBC News, or the like on Twitter (the main feeds, mind you, organizations of that size sometimes have myriad special interest feeds of higher quality) for their news, they are perpetuating the old, hot, medium of broadcast news. Those people might otherwise be giving themselves the opportunity to engage with the creation of news and  to hear voices otherwise marginalized as they do when they read Nick Kristof’s feed or that of many other excellent reporter/tweeters.

 

Intermedia Influence and Coverage of Libya

Today brought new and terrible news of Gaddafi regime forces targeting journalists covering the ongoing conflict in Libya. A BBC Arabic news team was taken from their van this past week on trying to reach Zawiya, were beaten and subject to mock executions and held for 21 hours, before being released and flown out of Libya. Currently, a Guardian writer who has received high honors in his profession and is a veteran of Somalia, Iraq, Afganistan and Sudan is missing in the western half of the country.These are just two of many cases.

If Gaddafi is targeting journalists so as to further decrease international attention on Libya and in so doing relatively quietly crush the rest of the opposition, sadly he may be succeeding. Already Libya, despite the gripping scenes of civil war, is sliding further down the sites of major western papers. Anderson Cooper did not rush into Zawiya the way he did Cairo, and there is good reason for that. The thugs sent out by Gaddafi seem to have even less concern for rules of conflict than those sent out into Cairo by Mubarak. Of course there were many high and low profile instances of reporters being harmed in Cairo, but that was a protest/conflict in which journalists could predict with more certainty from where it might be safe to report. Great reporters will continue to do great work in Libya under threat of grave harm, but the overall depth and amount of reports will have to take a hit.

This leads me to the question of intermedia influence. More specifically, the influence of social media on traditional media broadcast, something I’ve been thinking about recently. Following Andy Carvin and Mona Eltahawy on Twitter has been interesting, as they’ve been curating tweets on the subject of Libya, along with myriad other issues. They’re following a model I think some mass media outlets will follow soon: monitoring the blogosphere, social media and other unofficial outlets of news for information on parts of the conflict it is becoming impractical to cover otherwise.

This curating of new media reporting has its advantages, besides the obvious one of requiring fewer of an organization’s people on the ground in Libya. Citizen reporting is an unmediated way of letting a people express their experience to the world for themselves. Now for all the disadvantages of this model: inaccuracy, more bias, and generally not the journalistic standards that come with trained reporters. In the case of Libya, where just 5% of the population has regular access to the internet you’ll just get less reporting (and more you’ll need to translate) or you’ll end up quoting outside observers who have an interest in proceedings but no special knowledge you don’t have.

Agree that the mass media is starting to fulfill this curator role on stories such as this? Surely this is for other reasons than just reporter safety, but what do you think of this as a more permanent model?