Covering the news with Twitter

Cory Bergman May 8th, 2008

WCNC just used Twitter to cover the North Carolina primary. “It was incredibly successful,” says WCNC’s Kayla Castille, who said reporters and anchors “really got into it.” Of course, Twitter has been gaining popularity in media circles, from the New York Times to CNN to the Seattle PI. But there’s a difference between using Twitter as another distribution path for news updates and actually leveraging it as a distributed coverage tool. WCNC created different Twitter accounts for the station’s reporters and anchors covering the story, then it aggregated all their Twitter messages on a single page on WCNC.com. The end result was real-time, unmoderated updates delivered from multiple mobile devices covering the same story. Plus, it doesn’t force you to sign up to Twitter to follow the coverage. Pretty smart. (Full disclosure: just like my employer KING, WCNC is a Belo station.)

Update: IndyStar.com is doing something similar right now covering the Indy 500. “We’re using Twitter to deliver quick notes about top speeds, crashes and schedule information,” writes Adam Yates in comments below.