Twitter for newsgathering? Reuters makes news

A recent NewsMaker meeting at the London office with Hector Sants, chief executive of the UK's Financial Services Authority, was opened up to all-comers via Twitter and attracted the interest of CNN which sent a crew to tape Reuters’ social media team in action at the event. CNN broadcast a report on its International Correspondents show.

Twitter enables the broadcast of SMS-length (maximum 140 characters) texts. President Obama is the world’s most prominent “tweeter”.

“What caught the CNN crew’s imagination was our use of Twitter to create a live channel from Reuters readers to our NewsMaker,” Mark Jones, community editor, wrote in a Reuters blog.

“Ahead of time we had publicised the fact that Hector Sants was coming in and had agreed to take readers’ questions. We asked readers to add a question to our blog comments or to go onto Twitter and to use the askfsa tag.

“As word got around about what we were doing dozens of Twitter users started sending in comments and questions. My role was to monitor them (most came in during the event) and to pick out the most interesting ones to put to Sants.

“CNN wanted to know where was the journalism in that. Answer: same as ever - filtering large amounts of information for the nuggets (there were more than 200 questions and comments) and trying to pull together any themes.”

A non-scientific CNN poll on the question: should journalists use Twitter as a newsgathering tool has found opinion is running in favour.

Editor-in-chief David Schlesinger started the Twitter debate in January over his own twitterings from the World Economic Forum. He even scooped his own team of correspondents covering the annual meeting in Davos. ■