I’ve been in the television news business since dinosaurs (aka, film cameras, paper-based teleprompters and typewriters) roamed newsrooms.
The buzz for the past couple of years in the television news industry has been all about change. Television news is losing advertisers and so, news organizations look for ways to increase revenue. A few years ago, web sites were an afterthought. Today, web sites and their spawn are challenging traditional methods of newsgathering.
While the change has been gradual, this week the newsroom in which I happen to work, WPLG – Local 10 in South Florida, took a long leap into the future.
It came in the way of Twitter. If you don’t know about Twitter, you will. It’s Facebook on acid. And for some reason, this week, it set the news on fire.
“What’s up with this Twitter all of a sudden?” my friend Bonnie from a Los Angeles news organization asked me?
While most producers and traditional journalists have fought web technology tooth and nail, they are embracing Twitter like flies to a flame. The newsroom at WPLG this week was all a-twitter with tweets. And even those who said they would never do it, jumped on the bandwagon and stayed there.
I am the Managing Editor of http://www.justnews.com, Local 10’s web site. I love my job. My friends kid me that I get paid to play on the internet all day. This week, I came even closer to that job description than ever before.
Attention journalism students and jobseekers … this is the new journalism.
It’s not perfect. It does tend to dumb down your work and your audience when you have less than 150 words to tell a story. But think of the possibilities.
During the next few weeks I’ll add to the lessons we’ve learned using Twitter.
And who knows what’s just around the corner.
Welcome to the new newsroom. Follow Local 10 at http://www.twitter.com/talkto10.
Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/barbbesteni.
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