International news agencies join forces for social media coverage of climate summit

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Eleven news agencies from across the globe will collaborate in a social media experiment to cover the next fortnight's United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen.

The Press Association, the US' Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Dutch agency ANP, APA of Austria, APcom of Italy, Canadian Press, dpa of Germany, Kyodo of Japan, Lusa of Portugal and RIA of Russia will all contribute to a Facebook fan page set up for the event. The Climate Pool page , which had 198 fans at time of writing, will be produced in English and will aim to cover the proceedings in Copenhagen in an interactive way. Multimedia updates will also be posted to the page alongside blog posts, a press release said.

This is the latest experiment in social media coverage of events by the AP following its successful partnership with Yahoo in the summer to report on the hearings of Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll said each project is designed to help the agency better understand what tools are best used for covering certain events and answer questions about social media newsgathering and distribution.

The agency is also recruiting a new social media editor to oversee future projects in this area, she added.

For the UN conference the AP has set up a dedicated Twitter stream, @AP\_climatepool , to ask for questions and comments on the happenings from followers.