Ah, the microblog. Such a new phenomenon that spell check has underlined it for me, as if to say, “why, what on earth could this be? This isn’t in my dictionary. What is this microblog you speak of?” Not to worry, spell check! You’re not alone in your state of oblivion. Many have yet to fully understand the art of microblogging. I recommend to you and to all of those people, spell check, reading chapter 4 of Briggs’ Journalism Next for a crash course in microblogging 101. Briggs discusses the following in this chapter:
- How and why microblogging became popular
- How microblogging works
- How professional news organizations use Twitter to compliment their existing publishing platforms
- How to build a community of followers
- How individual journalists can make microblogging work for them in their professional lives
The only microblog that I am familiar with is Twitter. Even so, I’ve only been active on Twitter for a few weeks, so I hardly consider myself an expert Tweeter. Learning how journalists benefit from Twitter was informative and inspiring. I’m not saying I don’t care about the history of the microblog. But, it’s already here. With a bang. So while I think it’s great that Twitter was used for alerts and communication during stressful situations once upon a time, I mostly just want to figure out how to get the most out the the damn thing in the here and now.
So, what’d I learn?
- Don’t put Twitter on auto-pilot. It prevents the journalist from engaging with the community.
- For journalists, the benefit of microblogging is learning about your audience.
- The 80-20 rule: 80 percent of your posts should be informative, 20 percent should be personal.
- Quality over quantity.
A growing concern of mine with this whole microblog phenomenon was the role that journalists would play. If everyone is on Twitter spitting out stories, do you really need journalists?
“Even with ordinary citizens Twittering away about breaking news, journalists still play an important role by verifying facts and publishing updates as more information becomes available. People were already turning to news organizations’ Web sites for the latest developments in the news, and now they turn to those organizations’ Twitter feeds for even more immediate information.” – Briggs, pg. 102
Looks like we do still need journalists. Phew.
Tags: Briggs