Pages

Monday 9 February 2009

Future of the newsroom - giant screens showing Twitscoop

If you go into any newsroom you'll see TVs. I'm told these are not merely there for journalists who want to sneakily catch up on the cricket at the lunchtime, but so the newsroom can monitor breaking news and their rivals' output.

Obviously these TVs are still useful for doing the latter, but for the former surely Twitter or a place like Twitscoop is the place to be.

How long will it be before someone rigs up a giant screen in a newsroom with Twitscoop on it? Or perhaps even better, why not plug Twitscoop into Tweetdeck and then set up several other feeds searching for the top stories of the day and stick all that on your giant screen? (You may wish to use several smaller screens depending on the layout of your office and available resources.)

That way the whole newsroom can monitor breaking news at a glance. We all know that for certain stories - like earthquakes - Twitter is faster and it's a great citizen journalism/crowdsourced supplement to the press wires.

I would get that done as a matter of urgency if I was in charge of a newsroom. But I'm not.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Give it time- If Twitter gets all over the world eg Iraq, Gaza, Congo- then there is an even wider range of tweets for the newsroom

Daniel Bennett said...

Good point there. Twitter clearly has a 'developed world' bias at the moment but already all sorts of people are on it in different places.

And if there is big news in an obscure location it might still work. The potential power of Twitter is that one twitterer in an obscure location can be retweeted around the world.

Anonymous said...

When I moved to Asheville, NC there was an earthquake a few days later
(8/25/05- 11:15 PM). We immediately turned on the live LOCAL news. No reaction, no news, nothing.

I finally googled and learned about "Did you feel it?" (not a post-coital assessment page) at
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/ and confirmed that indeed, there HAD been a quake.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/events/se/hbw0825a/us/index.html

Post a Comment

Comments

 
Copyright 2009 Mediating Conflict. Powered by Blogger Blogger Templates create by Deluxe Templates. WP by Masterplan