We wrote last weekend about the Ferndale Enterprise, a tiny weekly newspaper in a small farming town in Northern California that covered a 6.5 earthquake exclusively on Twitter. Photos from the paper’s Twitter coverage were the first from the epicenter, appearing on major news sites across the country, from msnbc.com to LATimes.com.

“I basically was standing in the middle of Ferndale thinking, I’ve got the material, now what do I do?” said editor/publisher Caroline Titus, who explains she’s a “one-woman newspaper” with 27 years of traditional reporting experience. Posting it on the Ferndale Enterprise’s website was not an option, as the site isn’t set up to handle daily news. “Thank goodness for the younger generation. My 20-year-old daughter, who is a junior at Stanford University and managing editor of news for the Stanford Daily, instructed me to upload them to Twitter immediately,” she said.

So Titus began tweeting every few minutes, posting firsthand accounts (“Whoa, that was a good one, aftershock, hold on”), damage reports, photos, and quotes (“They say you’re not supposed to run outside, but I did, there were bottles falling everywhere,” Paul Christensen, Ferndale J&W Liquors.) At the time, she had just 11 followers on Twitter. Within an hour, the number climbed over 100, and she started receiving messages from Fox News and CNN.

“(I) was really blown away by the kudos from people around the world,” Titus said. “A few of my readers have said thanks when I have seen them on the street. But, we live in an older community and so a great amount of my readers are not tuned into Twitter.”

Titus spent the rest of the week putting out the paper while keeping the updates coming on Twitter. “Without over thinking this, I think that Twitter was the perfect ‘middle-man’ this week between putting out a traditional weekly newspaper that people can hold, study, share, clip, take to the bathroom and giving away all your content online,” she said. “Will we garner any new subscribers from the world audience our tweets had? I doubt it. But the business end of our jobs fly out the window during breaking stories. It’s an opportunity for us all, I think, to focus on why we became journalists in the first place.”

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