The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it.

Twitter for newsgathering

Contacts are central to a journalist’s work. Twitter makes it easier to find them. But whereas, for instance, Facebook requires someone to accept you as their ‘friend’ before you get updates; you can follow people on Twitter regardless. It’s where blogging meets social networking.

The more people you follow on Twitter, the more likely you are to come across a lead or a useful contact. News of the recent UK earthquake, for example, broke first on Twitter, while last year news of a fire in East London broke there too. And even as I type this, someone I know at St Pancras station has twittered that it is being evacuated. You might also use Twitterverse or PicoBuzz to spot important phrases (e.g. events).

Here’s a simple ticklist to fill your Twitter contacts book:

1. Obviously you should begin by searching Twitter for people you know, or know of, in your field. The Labour Party, Lib Dems and Conservatives all have their own Twitter accounts, for example, as do some politicians. But beware of hoaxers. This isn’t really Chuck Norris, for example. Is it?
2. Then, look at who they’re following (I find entering someone’s username on Gridjit is the best way of seeing someone’s contacts and what they’re saying, or you can use Quotably to follow their conversations).
3. Then try Twits Like Me to find people with similar interests (based on what you’ve twittered)
4. and Twubble (based on your friends) or Who Should I Follow? (which allows you to adjust according to whether you want people nearer your location or more or less popular)
5. and Tweetscan for key words (e.g. “health”, “NHS”).
6. Finally Twitterlocal will help you find twitterers in your local area.
7. You can also find a list of significant Twitter users in various fields at the Twitter Pack Project. However, as this is a wiki there is a risk that people have added themselves. It’s also US-focused.

The Birmingham Post, and particularly reporter Jo Geary, are leading Twitter-users among regional newspapers. She sees it as a great way of building a relationship with your contacts and target audience.

“It’s not just popping in, getting something, and popping out, but building something more. And because of that it’s also become a support network of people who help me, and vice versa. It moves into the crowdsourcing thing – if you want to do something you can put out questions and get answers.”

It’s all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming a conversation with readers. Abbie Lundberg, for instance, wrote one article by soliciting tweets on the topic from her followers. Nico Luchsinger even conducted his interview with me via Twitter (which gave me the unique experience of being interviewed while shopping in Tesco.)

Managing your Twitter feeds

Once you’ve set up all those contacts, it’s useful to create some filters to help manage the incoming information. Gridjit, again, has a clearer interface for viewing tweets. Desktop applications like Twhirl will give you an audio alert; Snitter allows you to filter your tweets – for key words or tweets containing links for instance. You can also set up pages to organise tweets from ‘crowds’ of twitterers (for example, friends, colleagues, contacts) using Crowdstatus.com.

You can – and should – set up Twitter to send updates to your mobile phone (click on ‘add device’ or look in settings). It’s free, and is particularly useful for following what’s happening while you’re on the move. But pick your sources carefully – Twitter will only send 250 updates per week, and it’s easy to hit that.

The first thing you should do once you’ve set up Twitter to send text alerts is to text Twitter the word “track” followed by your username. This means Twitter will text you whenever anyone mentions your username on Twitter – very useful for picking up messages aimed at you. You can use the same trick to track mentions of key words in your area, such as a key employer or your own organisation (More tips on mobile commands can be found here). If you prefer email alerts, MobiFeedLive.com and Tweet Scan (not to be confused with Tweetscan) provide them.

You can also follow links that are getting passed about a lot on Twitter though Twitterbuzz and Twitt(url)y. While Twist is a pretty impressive equivalent of Google Trends (from comments).

Twitter for news publishing, distribution and creation

If you want an idea of what Twitter can do for news publishing check out BreakingNewsOn. Headline alerts of breaking news that people can receive on their mobiles are the most obvious application, and used by dozens of organisations including the BBC, the Guardian and CNN (This post has a list of news organisations using Twitter). It’s a good way of alerting people to your content, as well as inviting participation, as Emap’s David Cushman recently tweeted: “Comments on my blog are going mad. Nothing has changed except I now use twitter regularly.”

Many newspapers have separate Twitter accounts for different sections, such as business, traffic and sports. Sky even have one for news about Madeleine McCann.

Twitterfeed will save you typing updates by pushing RSS feeds from your newspaper to a Twitter account, but this means you have to write the article first and risk missing the scoop. Instead it’s better to ‘tweet’ (post to Twitter) before you write the article – ensuring you get to the top of Google quickly, as Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves did with the arrest of Karren Brady:

“I’m only followed by 30 people or so … But these people are all … in the business of sharing information and knowledge. Consequently, a number of them followed my link to the story on the Post website, and started to talk about it on their own blogs and again through Twitter, with the effect that the Post site received an incredible number of hits as word spread.”

If you really want to track how many people are clicking on any of your links you can also use Tweetburner (or Twitt(url)y to see what they’re saying if they pass it on). Or you can use Intwition to see who’s linking to a particular domain.

Twitter is particularly useful for journalists reporting live via text message themselves. Sky reporter Julia Reid recently used it to post her “minute-by-minute” experiences at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Robert LaHue used it “to semi-liveblog a board meeting via texting” and it’s often used at conferences and events. You can also download applications that allow you to update Twitter from your mobile – this article compares 20 of them.

Going beyond 140 characters

And if you’re frustrated by the 140 character limit try some of these tools:

• Twitzer is a Firefox extension that allows you to write tweets over 140 characters. MessageDance does much the same via email, and also allows comments on tweets.
• twi8r translates text speak into ‘English’ and vice versa, allowing you to truncate your messages
• Twittermail.com and Tweetahead allow you to pre-schedule tweets to be posted (for when you are not at a computer); the latter also lets you send and receive tweets via email
• Tweetr is a Twitter reader that allows you to send files up to 10MB through Twitter.
• TwitPic allows you to send images from your phone and not only posts links straight to your Twitter account but allows people to post comments that are then posted on their own Twitter page (with a link to the photo). Mobypicture does something similar. TwitterSoap is a mashup of Mobypicture and Twitter.
• SnapTweet posts your latest Flickr picture to Twitter; Autopostr.com does much the same.
• Twiddeo allows you to do the same with video.
• Twixxer does both photo and video sharing
• And American and Canadian users can phone in their tweets using Jott.
• Or you can use the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, which does most of the above and much, much more.

But Twitter becomes really impressive when you tap into its social, conversational nature – or combine the RSS feeds from a number of twitterers. Shawn Smith used it to create the Michigan Twitter Network, which “follows more than 1,300 Michigan twitterers. We’ve gained about 200+ followers and use this account @mlive to send breaking news alerts and also poll users.” (I’ve created something similar for Birmingham twitterers). In Spain, ADN.es used it to follow voter reactions during a televised presidential candidate debate on TV.

My recent experiment with, of all things, a live book review on Twitter demonstrated that the boundary between publishing and conversation becomes blurred when you use the technology – confusing if you’re bothered about semantics, but encouraging if you’re interested in positive relationships between the journalist and reader.

At the end of the day, Twitter is just a platform. What I’ve outlined here is just the start, and there are plenty of experiments being done – the really interesting stuff starts when you try something completely new…

Feel free to follow me, by the way, at twitter.com/paulbradshaw

For more information see my Twitter-related links, or read my other blog posts about Twitter.

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been turning the Online Journalism Blog into a group blog. For our first project we have taken Jo Geary’s news interactivity index, and applied it Europe-wide, creating an ‘interactivity index’ of newspapers across European countries – at the moment: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland…

Not just that, but we’ve made the index itself interactive. Specifically, Nicolas Kayser-Bril has created this PHP object which allows you to compare two selected newspapers or countries.

The team so far is as follows: UK and France: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Switzerland: Nico Luchsinger; Portugal and Spain: Alex Gamela; Poland: Marek Miller; Macedonia: Darko Buldioski; Hungary: Molnar Emil; Netherlands: Wilbert Baan.

If you want to help add information on one or more of your country’s newspapers you can do so here – you’ll need to ask Nicolas for a password: nicolas (at) observatoiredesmedias.com.

More newspapers will continue to be added, and there are other graphical tricks to come.

You can also embed this widget on your own blog with the following code:

<iframe src=”http://tinyurl.com/5c9vmy” frameborder=”0″ height=”605″ scrolling=”no” width=”415″></iframe>

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I’ve been painfully aware of my (and many people’s) ignorance of blogs written in languages other than English. I’m aware of some – Andre Deak in Brazil; Philip Couve in France; Alex Gamela in Portugal (who writes every post in English too); Nico Luchsinger in Switzerland; Beppe Grillo in Italy (also in English); and Adam Javurek in the Czech Republic – but really I could do better.

And I’ve started creating a Yahoo! Pipe which (clumsily) translates three of those blogs into English (sadly Adam tells me there is no online Czech to English translator)

So here’s a call for comments – what are the best non-English blogs, either about journalism specifically or social media generally?

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Nico Luchsinger writes about the microblogging tool. Based on an article he wrote for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

I recently mentioned to a colleague of mine, who also is a freelance journalist, that I’m researching an article about Twitter. “I hope you really trash this service”, was his answer. “This is nothing else than verbal diarrhoea.”

This reaction is not untypical for people having never used the service – I remember that I thought more or less the same when I first heard about Twitter. That even the most ardent users of the service (which, by now, include me) are often at pains to explain what it really is that Twitter does, is of course not helping the case.

Nonetheless, Twitter has in the past six months nearly tripled its user base, to an estimated 800’000 in January. And if you play around a little bit with Twitter, you will very quickly realise that there is a huge potential for journalists and media companies.

Breaking the news quickly (and easily)

First of all, Twitter is a great way of breaking news very quickly and easily. Twitter’s mobile notification service makes it perfect for this kind of service, and its open API guarantees that the information can be fed into the service at very low cost.

There are the “classical” examples, where a media company just distributes its news updates via Twitter. CNN’s Breaking News are already available, and San Diego’s TV station KBPS famously used Twitter to keep the population informed when its website crashed during the wildfires last October.

But Twitter also makes it possible to break the news in a different way: When Iowa held its caucuses for the US presidential elections on January 3rd, political strategist Patrick Ruffini asked people participating in the caucuses to send him the results directly via Twitter.

Ruffini in turn then aggregated the results and re-distributed them on a Twitter channel he had set up specifically for the Iowa caucuses.

The outcome, wrote Ruffini a day later on his blog, was impressive: “This exercise in citizen journalism foretold the result far more quickly than dispatching two dozen stringers to caucus locations throughout Iowa.”

More recently, however, Twitter also made the blogosphere angry when the service went down due to server overload during Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld.

Connecting with readers

On a more personal level, Twitter can be a great way for journalists to connect with their readers. This, of course, also helps journalists: “One day, when I was researching an article, I was looking for a specific piece of information”, says Thomas Knuewer, blogger and reporter at the German newspaper “Handelsblatt”. “So I just asked the question on Twitter – and had the answer I was looking for within minutes.”

Knuewer then began asking his Twitter followers for questions before he did an interview.

“For each interview, I got about 5 to 10 questions from people over Twitter”, he says. “That’s actually quite an impressive number if you consider that I have about 300 people following me.”

Aggregating data

Remember the days when every second newspaper article began with the phrase “When you enter the word XY on Google, you get [insert huge number here] of results” ? Twitter takes this form of data analysis one step further. The 800’000 or so Twitter users produce a gigantic information flow every day – and the Twitter API provides the tools to analyze and aggregate that data, and eventually put it to a journalistic use.

One great example is the site Politweets which searches all the tweets for the names of the US presidential candidates and then creates a ranking. Politweets was created by a company named character140, and the tech blog Mashable! asked the question: Why didn’t Twitter create this itself? But the question should rather be: Why didn’t a news company build this – and integrate it into its website?

While Politweets only aggregates data on a specific subject, the hashtags idea aims to provide data from Twitter for a much broader range of subjects. Hashtags.org collects tweets from users that include a hashtag (which is just a tag with a hash symbol, e.g. #twitter) and provides feeds for every tag.

Finally, there are several sites that allow you to directly poll the Twitter userbase, for example Twittpoll and Twittercensus.

…a final word about money

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s completely free. This and the API have allowed the service to grow very quickly over the last year or so – but it also might create problems when it comes to monetarization.

Twitter’s lack of a business plan prompted Allen Stern of CenterNetworks to ask “Is Twitter F’ed?” The possibilities for making money through advertisements, argued Stern, are limited, because most people are accessing Twitter via third-party applications.

While Twitter itself remains suspiciously quiet about the issue, other bloggers have joined the discussion. Both Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis have refuted Stern’s argument, saying that there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money. Calacanis proposes in-feed and SMS advertising as well as a subscription model for premium users. Winer imagines that Twitter will design its own mobile phone (or partner up with a carrier to do it).

Twitter has already proven that it can provide a great service – now they have to show how to make money from it. If they fail, the company might run in to trouble rather soon – which would be a pity for everyone, but especially for journalists and media companies.

Have other ideas or examples how journalists and media companies can use Twitter? Share them in the comments!

This article was written by Nico Luchsinger. His personal blog (in German) is here.

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In the second part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Nico Luchsinger looks at how the news industry in Switzerland is experimenting with new media – and how new media is experimenting with news. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

In late August this year [2007], the Swiss Publisher’s Association (VSP) issued a statement. In it, the publishers attacked the Google News service, claiming that Google were infringing copyrights with the news aggregation service, and announced plans to launch their own news portal to rival the internet giant. A few weeks later, VSP president Hanspeter Lebrument was quoted as saying that “Google is afraid of us. If we’re not around anymore, Google has no content to offer.”

The reaction in the Swiss blogosphere to the VSP’s plans ranged from astonishment to desperation. “It is highly unlikely that Google will listen to the claims of Swiss publishers”, wrote media blogger Andreas Goeldi. (This view was confirmed a few months later when Google Switzerland boss Andreas Schoenenberger politely but firmly rejected the VSP’s accusations.)

Cautious and slow

The short episode is typical of the current situation in Swiss online journalism. Newspaper publishers view the internet rather as a threat than as a possibility. A small community of (media) bloggers thinks to know better, but is hardly ever listened to. The publishers (who, in Switzerland as much as anywhere else in the world, have never been the spearheads of innovation) have become more and more insecure as their core business – printing newspaper – is slowly eroding.

After a promising start in the mid-nineties, innovation on the web from traditional newspapers has been slow. “What the newspapers do online is mostly boring. There is no readiness to assume a risk or launch an experiment”, says Martin Hitz, who writes the influential media blog Medienspiegel.

The country’s best-selling newspaper, Blick, runs a rather uninteresting website that features, as the paper itself, mostly sensationalist stories with a few web 2.0 features such as commenting and rating of articles.

The Zurich-based Tages-Anzeiger, which from time to time calls itself “Switzerland’s best-selling quality newspaper”, has a similarly uninspiring presence on the web. Even after a recent redesign, the site looks like a relic from the late nineties. The content consists of selected articles from today’s print edition, a lot of hardly edited news agency infos, and some blogs, which are marginalised on the site and, it seems, not widely read.

The website of the also-Zurich-based Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), which has a lower circulation than the Tages-Anzeiger but bigger international renown, is far more popular (full disclosure: I used to be an editor for NZZ Online and am now a freelance contributor to the print edition). It underwent a complete redesign in July, which allowed for more flexibility in online publishing, but got mixed design and usability reviews. The redesign allowed readers to comment on every story, although comments are moderated, and it often takes several hours until they are approved.

The NZZ has also started to experiment with “blogs” from some of its foreign correspondents. While the quality of this content is excellent, the mere fact that the blogs do not have a feed renders the experiment potentially irrelevant. The NZZ runs also two independent blogging platforms (with feeds): on NZZvotum politicians from all parties write about their goals, and on NZZcampus, students from different universities blog about their life.

Like the Tages-Anzeiger and most other Swiss newspapers, the NZZ only puts part of its print edition online, and only for a limited time. “I just don’t understand why they are not giving away all their content online for free”, says media blogger Martin Hitz. “How do they expect to establish their brands online?” At least, the Tages-Anzeiger and, to a lesser extent, the NZZ have now begun to implement a cautious online-first strategy, where some articles from the forthcoming print edition are published first online.

Let’s print more free dailies

One of the reasons that the traditional daily newspapers have been under pressure are the free dailies. The biggest of them, 20 Minuten (which is, as the Tages-Anzeiger, owned by the Tamedia Group), is now by far the most-read newspaper in the country. A year ago, the Ringier media group (which owns Blick), launched the free daily heute, which is published in the afternoon.

In September 2007, media entrepreneur Sacha Wigdorovits, who was once editor-in-chief of Blick, launched yet another free daily, called .ch. This prompted the Tamedia Group to launch, in December, its second free daily News to compete with .ch. Together with the Le Matin bleu, a free daily published in the French-speaking part of the country, the estimated circulation of all the free dailies amounts to more than two million – in a country with a population of seven million. Most observers agree that this situation will not be sustainable, and that in the long run, only one of the free dailies will be able to survive.

All the free dailies run websites, with 20 Minuten being by far the most successful. With an online staff of about 30 people (which heavily exceeds the online staff of all other newspapers), it quickly became one of the most-visited websites in Switzerland. It features a lot of multimedia content and community options.

20 Minuten also tries to link its print edition to additional content on its website, and regularly prints excerpts from user discussions in its online forums. Its large editorial staff allows 20 Minuten to produce a lot of content for online-only use.

On the other side of the Röschtigraben

The picture gets slightly more interesting when one looks on the other site of the Röschtigraben - the line that divides the German- and French-speaking parts of the country. The Tribune de Genève hosts a blogging platform for its readers, whose blogs are prominently featured on the Tribune’s website as well as in the printed paper. It also publishes some podcasts. Le Matin, which like the Tribune is owned by the Edipresse Group, has at least a decently designed webpage, vaguely reminiscent of the Guardian’s website.

The clear front-runner in online journalism in Switzerland is the Ringier-owned weekly magazine L’Hebdo. It won much praise when, during the riots in French banlieues in 2005, it started the Bondyblog, where reporters wrote directly from the banlieues. The blog still exists, although it is now operated by a couple of young citizen journalists in France, and L’Hebdo only remains a partner to the blog.

More recently, L’Hebdo started Blog & Breakfast to cover the Swiss national elections which took place on October 21. Hebdo reporters visited candidates for the national parliament and stayed at their place for one night. The blog featured a lot of video and photo content. All posts where geotagged and could be browsed via an interactive map.

It is worth mentioning shortly the homepages of the magazines published by the Tages-Anzeiger and the NZZ: The Magazin, a weekly supplement to the Tages-Anzeiger, has recently redesigned its website. The new site is based on wiki technology, but readers can so far only collaborate by writing comments on the articles (which, at least, are all published in their entirety at the same time as in the print edition). NZZ Folio, which is each month devoted to one specific subject, can also be accessed online, and is additionally published as a downloadable audio version.

Too small a market?

Media blogger Martin Hitz sees the main reason for the slow online innovation in Switzerland in the relatively small market size. “In Germany, you can reach potentially millions with a new online offer, even if it is devoted to a very specific subject. Online editors in Switzerland very often just lack the resources to be innovative”, he says. There are, however, signs that some things will change in Swiss online journalism, although at a slow pace.

The Tamedia group announced that it will, in addition to their new free daily News, launch a new online portal in the first quarter of 2008. The portal, which will feature content from the Tages-Anzeiger, the Berner Zeitung and the Basler Zeitung, will have a “moderate online-first strategy” (whatever that means).

The website of Facts, a political weekly magazine owned also by Tamedia that has ceased publication this summer, was recently reborn as FACTS 2.0, which aggregates content from Swiss and German news sites and blogs, and lets users vote and comment on the stories. The business model of the site, said its boss Chris Luescher recently at a conference, is to sell the discussions of its users on a particular article back to the original source. While there is a lot of skepticism on whether this idea can work, it is at least proof of some innovation taking place.

The not-so-influential blogosphere

The gap in online journalism left by traditional media has so far not been filled by newcomers, let alone bloggers. While the Swiss blogosphere becomes more and more connected, it remains rather small (as the country itself) and without much influence on mainstream opinion. This is – again – at least in part due to the fact that the size of the Swiss market makes it virtually impossible to blog professionally.

The very notable exception is Blogwerk, an online-only publisher which pays its authors for blogging. Blogwerk currently publishes four blogs devoted to media, gadgets, photography and productivity, with more to follow soon. All the sites experience strong growth, wrote its founder and CEO Peter Hogenkamp in October when he announced that Blogwerk had raised some 300’000 Swiss francs (180’000 Euro) in additional venture capital. The Blogwerk blogs, however, are targeted not only at a Swiss, but at a German-speaking audience.

Another example is the blog Krusenstern which focuses on Russia and the Ukraine. While its author, the journalist Juerg Vollmer, does not work full time for his blog, the quality of his entries is exceptionally high and has led to the blog being widely read throughout German-speaking countries.

The Swiss mainstream media, meanwhile, does not ignore blogs completely. In fact, citation of blogs in Swiss print media has increased significantly over the last few years, writes political science student Sarah Genner in her recently completed master thesis on “Blogs and Democracy”. However, the quoted blogs tend to be written by people who are already part of the public discussion, such as politicans and journalists (the blog that was quoted most often was the one of Swiss government member Moritz Leuenberger). The blogs, concludes Genner, tend to amplify voices that have already been heard before rather than broadening the discussion.

Conclusion

Switzerland’s online media landscape suffers from a lack of innovation. This is partially due to the limited resources that traditional media can devote to online projects, but also due to the mindset of many Swiss publishers which continue to see the internet as a threat (or, even worse, as a temporary hype). Consequently, notes media blogger Martin Hitz, online journalists are often treated as “second-class editors”. Swiss bloggers remain a small group, largely occupied with themselves, with only a few blogs having access to a broader audience. And while there are some online journalism projects worth watching closely, Switzerland is, even within Europe, still lagging several years behind.

This article is available as a wiki to be updated, corrected, or added to. Please help improve it if you can.

Nico Luchsinger, 25, is a history student and freelance journalist based in Zurich. He blogs at Hundertfünfzig Worte.

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