Online Journalism News

Reporters Twitter site to launch

Tomorrow sees the launch of a new site aimed at journalists infatuated with Twitter, the latest darling of social-based media tools.

The brainchild of a Dutch freelance journalist, reportwitter.com aims to "unpack" the process of constructing and creating a story by providing a platform for members to display recent articles alongside "tweets" - short, pithy, public messages of 140 characters or less - that are the lifeblood of the Twitter community.

"Reportwitters are reporters with a twist; like everyone else, we work for newspapers, agencies, magazines and trade press around the globe. But as we engage in the reporting process, we invite everyone involved to stay tuned to our endeavours," says the site.

In Twitter, tweets can be about anything. Critics have blasted the site for throwing up nothing more than pointless expressions of vague intent - "Might be going to the shops this afternoon" - or banal factoids - "Receiving some emails sent on the 1st August. Weird"; evangelists claim that in the hands of jobbing hacks the quasi-real-time messaging system can add revealing context to the stories they are working on.

"The Twitter platform is perfect for setting a stage," Angelique van Engelen, who has spent the last six months developing ReporTwitter, told Journalism.co.uk.

"It would be really nice if journalists that are tweeting set up an interview through it, for example. This is like reality-style reporting: it's an added dimension to journalism."

She singles out BBC reporter Ben Hammersley's recent use of Twitter to add context to his coverage of the Turkish elections, and to inform followers when broadcasts were going out on television.

On one occasion, he used tweet to inform members that the Turkish army objected to the placement of a camera near a hotel window opposite an army base.

"It's not significant enough to be in the news report, but it adds something that at the moment general news reports don't have - this sort of nitty-gritty detail," says van Engelen.

Twitter has been the site of other journalistic experiments this year, including Sky News reporter Derek Tedder's coverage of the demonstrations at Heathrow Airport, posting short messages to the site and photos to Flickr.



Traditional media is already clambering all over the site, harnessing its instantaneous, multi-device appeal - it goes to mobile phones as well as web - to flag up stories of interest and drive traffic to their sites.

Van Engelen is relaxed about how ReporTwitter develops, and doesn't see it as a replacement for existing media coverage. But at the very least, it offers freelancers a chance to be able to exhibit, elaborate and discuss their work online.

"I don't want the platform to be an end in itself, and it's definitely not to evangelise Twitter. But it can create articles with a reality-style angle," she says.

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