After I posted about
Twitter-connected citizens posting updates on the Iowa caucus, I talked about the event online (using Twitter, natch) with James Geluso, city goverment reporter at the
Bakersfield Californian. I asked James if he'd write a guest post for TNM sharing his thoughts about the Iowa experiment, and the risks and opportunities of using Twitter in the newsroom.
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Patrick Ruffini says his experiment using Twitter to collect Iowa caucus results was "an unqualified success." And it was, for what it was. Had I known about it beforehand, I'd have followed it for sure.
But Ruffini gets a little, shall we say, overenthusiastic about what it achieved:
Very shortly after 7 p.m. central time, all the reports were pointing in a single direction: a big night for Barack Obama. This led me to post at 7:20 p.m. that the trendlines were for Obama, long before the media caught on.
Well, sure, it's easy when you set the bar low. I looked through the tweets from the night and counted 11 reports from Twitter users from Democratic caucuses. Eleven. That's results from 0.6 percent of the 1,781 precincts. It's not that the media hadn't caught on, it's that they have to refrain from making calls until they have, say, 75 percent of the results in. Anything less and they'll be savaged for being irresponsible. And making a call based on fewer points is unsafe. If NBC called it wrong, there'd be a storm of outrage. If Ruffini called it wrong, would anybody mind?
It's also worth noting that while Ruffini derides dispatching two dozen stringers to caucus locations throughout Iowa, about a third of the tweets that night were relaying information gleaned from the mainstream media: both entrance poll results and official counts reported by the state party.
Don't get me wrong. Ruffini's experiment was great, and hopefully will pave the way for an army of Twitterers who can provide unofficial and comprehensive results in the 2012 caucuses. And it's better to have it than to not. But so far, the best it promises is a faster and less accurate version of what the professionals provide.
So that was Thursday night. What happens with Twitter and news coverage next?
There are two sides to new techonologies: use for collection of news, and use for distribution. Ruffini's system used Twitter for both, which I think is the best use of it.
As a collection mechanism, the problem is with the number of people and with identifying them. If, say, CNN put out a call for people to tweet to them to report numbers, how would it verify that these people are not campaign workers or even at the caucus? News organizations have to know who is talking to them, even if they are willing to withhold their names in print (which the national media is, and local media tends not to be). They could say something like, "Our Twitter poll indicates Obama leading," but then they're doing what they get criticized for -- calling results before the results are in.
They could use Twitter as a way to collect responses, the way ABC used Facebook Saturday night, but then it depends on how they edit them. ABC picked the lamest, most boring, citizen comment to read on the air between the debates, and used lame questions for the polls; but that's a problem with ABC, not with Facebook.
I wonder if Twitter could be used to set up a "discussion group" for people watching the debates or something. Would the signal-to-noise ratio be high enough?
For news distribution, I don't know. Would Twitter be better for a news organization than having people sign up at NewsOrganization.com for news? Or maybe it doesn't have to be either/or. I'd like to see topical news alerts made available through Twitter, but with 140 characters I'm not sure the amount of news you'd get would be worth it for the number of times your phone would beep with NewsOrganization.com trying to get your attention.
- James Geluso