Bloggasm

Back in September of 2007, [Jim Long] left on a secret trip to Iraq with President Bush on Air Force One. “The secrecy around the trip made it all feel very Tom Clancy. I had to maintain my routine, which included my tweets,” he explains, which for a frequent tweeter like @newmediajim, wasn’t an easy task.

“On our long flight from Joint Base Andrews, people began to notice my absence,” he explains. “Once we had safely landed and the AP had reported our arrival, I was able to get on Twitter.” And he found a tweet that said, “@newmediajim must be in Iraq” because he “went off the grid 24 hours ago.”

Meet the first network TV journalist on Twitter

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#CNNTV garnered over 15,000 Tweets and became a Trending Topic by consistently showing the hashtag on-air in the lead-up to Kate’s arrival. But it was the arrival of Prince William and Prince Harry at Westminster Abbey that sent CNN’s hashtag, #CNNTV through the roof with 252 Tweets per minute.

A Royal Reason for Twitter and TV

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In the old days, those kinds of tips maybe would have been passed along from newsroom to newsroom on the informal gossip network while everybody waited for the official confirmation.
But Urbahn posted it immediately, along with two or three followups saying he wasn’t SURE the news was true.
The point is, Twitter gives normal people access to the newsroom gossip that previously remained private. That’s a huge change in how information is disseminated.

If A Rumor Turns Out To Be True, Is It News?

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On the Web, the interest was evident in the constant stream of comments about Bin Laden posted onto Facebook overnight — several every second. Many of the comments were short repetitions of the news — “Bin Laden is dead,” often with exclamations — as if the news was taking some time to sink in.

Reflecting the experiences of many others, Tim Nicholson, a student at American University who was 9 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, told Slate that he heard about the Bin Laden’s death when “I saw someone change a status on Facebook.”

U.S. Networks Scramble on News of Bin Laden’s Death

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A 33-year-old IT consultant, Athar was on Twitter when the sound of a helicopter flying overhead drove him to write a series of frustrated notes. Over the next few hours, he compiled rumors and observations about an event that would soon have the world riveted: Athar tweeted the secret operation that killed Osama bin Laden. “I am just a Tweeter, a guy awake at the time of the crash,” he wrote after the world noticed he had a front seat to history and inundated him with questions and messages

Sohaib Athar’s Tweets from the attack on Osama bin Laden – read them all below

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This is a strange, Twitter-borne tale of flirting, cutouts, and lack of online caution in the intelligence and defense worlds. Professionals who should’ve known better casually disclosed their personal details (a big no-no in spook circles) and lobbed allegations they later couldn’t or wouldn’t support (a big no-no in all circles). It led to a Pentagon investigation. And it starts with a Twitter account that no longer exists called @PrimorisEra.

Unfollowed: How a (Possible) Social Network Spy Came Undone

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For PBS I interviewed one of my favorite writers, Susan Orlean, about how the introduction of Twitter in her life affected her long-form journalism:

Orlean set up her account @susanorlean in early 2008 and at first didn’t understand the medium.

“When I started on Twitter, it was never with the express notion that this would be a way to talk to readers,” she told me in a phone interview. “I was encouraged to open an account by my assistant, and in the beginning I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what purpose it would serve or could serve. It took awhile before I could even figure out how you found people, who you’d want to follow, and why you’d want to follow them.”

It wasn’t long, however, before she was able to grasp what Twitter could provide in terms of reader feedback; to understand this radical change, consider the fact that when she became a staff writer for the New Yorker in the early ’90s, the magazine didn’t even have a Letters to the Editor page (it now has one called simply “The Mail”).

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