Tag Archives: sources
Traditional Reporting Techniques Still Key to Social Media News Gathering
Remember your first breaking news story? You ran to a phone booth, pulled a coin from your pocket, and “dialed” your editor. Don’t remember that? Well Mark Colvin does.
As a 35-year veteran journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Colvin has seen technology change dramatically. While the typewriters, carbon copies, switchboards and telex machines have faded away, he sees social media as the most significant change of his career.
“In the last year or so, social media has brought an even more revolutionary development. It’s one which is transforming our approach, particularly to conflict reporting,” said Colvin in an essay for The Punch.
He looks at how Jess Hill (ABC) and Andy Carvin (NPR) used Twitter to find sources in North Africa and sees old-school reporting techniques at the core: cultivating sources and fact checking.
‘Never’ Use Twitter as a News Source? Let’s Talk
This post was originally published on Wendy Fry’s Posterous blog, April 1, 2011.
I was in a collision this morning. A traffic accident of sorts between new media and old.
Somewhere between a jog on the beach, yet another redevelopment debate, FPPC complaints and hotel construction to cover, my two-years out of journalism school and fiercely protected new media mindset crashed full force into Stewart Jacoby, the director of radio programming for South Texas Public Broadcasting System, Inc., a broadcast journalist for the past 40 years.
It all began on Twitter, of course, with a tweet by Grant Barrett of voiceofsandiego.org:
“WHAT?!” I cried. Jacoby and I needed to have a conversation pronto so I could enlighten him on the ways of our brave new world.