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US local site adapts to Twitter format for breaking news

US local newspaper the Nashua Telegraph has been experimenting with Twitter for its breaking news coverage.

The New Hampshire-based newspaper site has developed a dedicated breaking news update area of its site that feeds alerts to Twitter.

The Nashua Telegraph Twitter updates or 'tweets' include a tinyurl address linking followers back to a mobile version of the Telegraph's site - a feature which, according to Damon Kiesow, managing editor of online at the paper, distinguishes the service from standard alert services offered by news sites.

"There are some papers that use Twitter for their entire news feed - it's an inappropriate use of the medium,"  Kiesow told Journalism.co.uk.

"The breaking news feed is specifically designed for mobile phones: it's very selective, so you're not going to get 50 updates a day, and it's news that's important regardless of where you are.”

The Twitter news updates represent the first layer of information available to the news team in building a story, said Kiesow, which can then be followed-up with SMS alerts and longer articles.

As such Kiesow sees the service as an affordable way for local news outlets to try out new methods of distribution. Something, he adds, that sites like the Telegraph should be focusing on.

Developing an identical format for news that features in the Twitter feed, the breaking news area and the mobile site, can help small teams achieve this, he added.

"People say that newspapers are a mass medium, but they're not - they're a collection of niche markets packaged together and dropped on your doorstep," he said.

"With online, while stories are the core of the site, there's a limited audience for 'news'. The new audience is going to come from different niches like video content and Twitter - it's those incremental audiences for 'non-news products' that we need to target.

"It's not about creating new content for these niches, but repackaging what we already have."

While currently in its infancy - the Nashua Telegraph has 81 followers on the service - Kiesow said further experiments in publishing Twitter feeds from reporters and photographers directly online was a possibility.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

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twitter | mobile | usa | nashua telegraph | damon kiesow |

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