When you’re used to writing 400-word stories, 140 characters doesn’t seem like a lot of text. But it’s surprising how much you can convey through a tweet.
The Valley Record signed up this summer for Twitter, the social networking and microblogging service that today claims more than 100 million users. Twitter users create 140-character posts that other users can follow.
The word “twitter” means “to speak rapidly and in a tremulous manner,” and also refers to bird chirps. That’s a decent description of Twitter’s quick, sometimes breathless style of communication.
Since June 30, Staff Reporter Allison Espiritu has posted more than 90 tweets in 70 days as ‘ValleyRecord.’ The tweets have garnered dozens of followers, from residents to businesses and organizations. Emerald City Smoothie and North Bend Suntan are on Twitter. So are the Sallal Grange, the City of Carnation and King County.
More and more Snoqualmie Valley residents and businesses are using the service to get the word out about special events and everyday happenings.
Businesses use Twitter and Facebook to announce a new employee or product line.
Like an online grapevine, Twitter’s brief, quick information dump caters to people’s continual craving for instant information.
In Allison’s hands, Twitter is more than just an adjunct to this paper’s Web site, where all of our coverage goes. She uses it as both a bulletin board and a sounding platform for topics outside our typical scope. For example, this summer Allison sent out tweets about a national egg recall and American soldiers returning home to the Northwest. There are plenty of locally focused tweets, too, such as blasting alerts on Snoqualmie Pass, new approaches to bullying prevention in regional schools and an alert on unauthorized curb painting in the city of Snoqualmie. Tweets that got the biggest attention, though, were the updates about our summer community festivals.
Twitter forces the author to be concise. It’s tricky at first to master the form. I thought I had written a post as short as could be, but found I had to trim it again, and then again, to fit. Tweeting became an exercise in finding the true kernel of information.
At the Record, we have embraced Twitter and Facebook as new avenues to get information out to the community, just like we’ve done with the Web. Society is changing, and technology can be bewildering, but newspapers have found that they must evolve with the times.
Social networking services are going to continue to evolve, too. Who knows what Twitter 2 or Facebook 3.0 will mean for users—and reporters. In five years, will people be tweeting with 500 characters or just 20?
As far as technology goes, the future is wide open. I can’t predict the next iPod or Kindle. But I do think that newspapers will keep finding ways, electronic or otherwise, to stay connected to their communities.
