Earlier this week, a report of “man overboard” from a Seattle-based ferry put the local Coast Guard station into immediate action. As boats and helicopters were being launched, real-time updates were being posted to Twitter. By the Coast Guard.
This full disintermediation, when the audience can get the news and information directly from the source, is only going to increase. For journalists, an official source using Twitter is a double-edge sword: the news organization doesn’t have to wait for press releases, but the information is not necessarily unbiased nor objective. Dale Steinke, who runs the web site for King 5 News, said his team was closely watching the Coast Guard’s Twitter stream (@uscgd13) but didn’t broadcast or publish anything directly from it. (And King 5, of course, was posting updates to its own Twitter feed: @king5seattle.)
“Our newsroom treated Twitter like a scanner for purposes of our on-air and online coverage, following tweets from the U.S. Coast Guard (@uscgd13) and the Washington State DOT (@wsdot), which we verified independently before publishing,” Steinke told me via email. “We DM’d them for updates and we put callouts to our followers for anyone who was on the ferry. We also found a photo @JohnLivengood took on the ferry and we asked for permission to use it on air and online. In the meantime, we retweeted the link to it, http://yfrog.com/0kdnkj.”
Brian Forth, a friend of mine who runs a Web site building company, was one of the people who were following the developing story on Twitter and blogged about it the next day.
During the next 15 minutes, I learned that the Coast Guard had scrambled a helicopter from Port Angeles as well as a boat from Station Seattle to assist in the search. Eventually, the tweet “@All the Coast Guard is standing down from the search” was posted after learning the report came from someone that thought they saw someone in the water. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
So, what’s the point? The point is that there is a lot that could’ve happened. The fact that users were connected meant the Coast Guard could’ve asked for help, and King 5 could determine if it was worth sending a crew to report, etc.
The Coast Guard, it turns out, has an ambitious social media strategy which you can hear about in the video below. We often talk about the “people formerly known as the audience” (via Jay Rosen) who are now participating in reporting the news. Increasingly, journalists need to consider how to deal with “people formerly known as sources,” too.
Mark Briggs 
Posted in 
Mark–
Like your point. It helps dull the roar of the ‘but we need boots on the ground’ argument from many journalists. If you have the people you were reporting on doing their own … reporting, the need to have as many newsorg employees on the ground decreases – you can have reporters paid for by the people who are already there.
For that matter, the reach is greater – there’s no way this Coast Guard story would have been reported as quickly without the help of the Coast Guard themselves doing the reporting.
Now, if we can just implement some guarantee that they will report the bad stuff with the good. Perhaps transparency is the answer?
The lesson is also that there was a huge amount of activity over … nothing. This only works if the people on the ground are reliable. We need to tread carefully, I think.
This is a consistently excellent blog, I read it frequently and track content via the editorial pages on journalism.co.uk
Another point is that consumers of this information are now able to get the information directly from the source. If I am uninterested in the latest fashion trends or celebrity gossip I simply don’t follow their tweets or their rss feeds or make them friends. I am not forced to filter through that info on news websites and or in print. Sort of like subscribing just to the Discovery channel vs. getting all cable channels.
I agree there are issues with making sure organizations are held accountable for good as well as bad. Having vigilant followers who will hold these organizations in check will help.
Ultimately it’s boils down to where people want to focus their attention. There are certainly plenty of distractions and noise. I believe those who can adequately synthesize the information they receive and filter out the junk will be those most valuable to their organizations and customers.
Another thing to keep in mind is the source. For a non-profit agency, the information has more reliability than an agency that has potential benefits from placing a spin on the story.
For example, at an oil spill I would prefer less bias boots on the ground.
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