Fort Hood Twitter Response
On Thursday, the Fort Hood massacre controlled the media and the public's attention. I was in the newsroom at my internship when the news broke. It was chaos. Reporters and producers were running around, making calls and sending e-mails trying to find out what happened. To my surprise, I received an e-mail that a Twitter account called FtHoodShootings was created shortly after the incident occurred. I was asked to monitor the account for any new information. Within seconds, there were 29 new posts. After a minute there were 346. After five minutes there were over a thousand. They were posts from those inside Fort Hood updating their friends and families to let them know they were ok. People were posting information about the shooter. They were asking if anyone could locate their loved ones. It was a kind of journalism I had heard about in class when we talked about Twitter, but had never really appreciated. We used posts from that Twitter account that night on the Evening News. Katie Couric also used Skype to talk to a woman inside of Fort Hood because we couldn't send a camera crew to interview her (because of the lock down). We were able to get so much more information to give to the public, so much faster. I'm sure things will only get faster from here on out.
posted by Alex Ludka at
4:05 PM
4 Comments:
Wow, I can't believe how fast the posts increased! Who first set up the Twitter account? That is really neat that you were asked to monitor the account. My only wonder is, how reliable do you think the posts were? If people were asking if anyone could locate their loved one, couldn't some random person make up some information and reply? Cruel, but I bet it happens. I guess in this case because it was breaking news, nothing is completely reliable, so you might as well use the most efficient tool. Twitter is truly proving itself to be a top outlet for so many different circumstances.
By
Nikki Adelman, At
November 12, 2009 1:06 AM
That's really interesting how helpful Twitter could be in a situation like that. I have to say that I agree with Nikki that such posts could be unreliable. There have been instances in which the news was exaggerated via blogs because the people updating them were simply not fully informed on the issue and I assume that the same thing could happen on Twitter. How did you decide which posts were reliable?
By
Betty, At
November 12, 2009 8:21 PM
I had used Twitter to find out information for my internship almost as soon as it happened. We were covering the Washington Capitals game and someone had gotten injured, so I turned to Twitter to figure out what had happened to him. I got my information and told my producer, but then I was worried about the reliability of the information. I had to wait to confirm the information until I heard a reporter on television confirm the injury report. It's very important to check your sources when using Twitter because once one person tweets something, others are sure to follow with that same information.
By
Stephanie Huff, At
November 17, 2009 11:33 AM
I'm not exactly sure who set up the Twitter account but we definitely didn't just rely on the posts as 100% true. I was basically asked to monitor for new information that we'd then verify to make sure it was true. It was just one more way to keep track and to possibly hear some news before the other networks.
The tweets we used on air were less informational and more emotional. We used them to show the fear soldiers who were on lockdown were feeling and the new way for them to reach their loved ones. For now, we can't use tweets as reliable sources. I think of them like Wikipedia; they're a great place to start but you can't use them as your final source.
By
Alex Ludka, At
November 23, 2009 12:23 PM
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