Social media as journalism in a small city

Back in March, an explosion tore apart a half block of downtown Bozeman. Moments after the explosion, lots of people downtown and elsewhere got on their computers, cell phones, Blackberries and other devices and started posted to Twitter using the hashtag #bozexplod. All day long, updates poured onto the site. At one point, several people were live-Tweeting radio coverage of city press conferences.

There was a lot of static on the line, so to speak, but if you stuck with it for a few minutes, a reader probably could have got some good up-to-the-minute news about the explosion -- something that the local media (apart from the radio stations) could not provide. Neither the local newspaper nor the local television stations broke their regular publishing schedules for the explosion. Had there been no radio or Twitter, no one would have known what was going on down there.

I've written about this before, but a new article published in Nieman Reports has brought up the subject again. Courtney Lowery, a wrtier at the online-only operation NewWest.net wrote the article from Nieman and graciously quoted my blog. (I had a nice phone interview with her a few months ago, but that didn't make it into the article. An mp3 of that interview is attached to this post.)

In her article, Lowery tells us that New West, even as an online-only outlet, has stumbled in learning how to use social networks as part of its journalism. The day of the explosion, she says, taught them a lot about how powerful social media was and how it could interact with mainstream media. She hits the nail on the head when she says that the real power of social media "is found in its ability to meaningful conversation with users."

Lowery goes on to point out something that became a concern for me after the initial excitement of the explosion had died down and after I'd had some time to reflect:

The Bozeman explosion served as a perfect example of how social media and mass media can lean on each other to create a new form of journalism. Throughout the coverage, I observed a fascinating symbiotic relationship forming. On-site observers used Twitter to cover the event in a way that we, as a small newsroom, could not. On the other hand, only a handful of people, especially in remote Montana, even knew at the time what Twitter was. So as good as the coverage was on Twitter, for the average Montanan, it was inaccessible until news organizations started using the information and pushing it to the broader public.

As far as cities in Montana go, Bozeman is one of the most wired. People have smart phones and wi-fi access is nearly ubiquitous. Yet the circle of people tweeting from Bozeman was relatively small. A few technorati handled it all, and we must remember that this was back before Oprah decided to make Twitter a household name. Few people had even heard of the service, so most of those tweets went out into the ether. A lot of potential news value bled off into cyberspace.

Another thing worth noting is that most of the tweeting was done by amateurs or enthusiasts, not by professional reporters. Granted, there aren't a heck of a lot of reporters in a city the size of Bozeman, and most of them were busy on the ground, covering the explosion the old fashioned way. Still, there was only a narrow connection between all the work that was going on on Twitter and the work that the mainstreamers were doing. At the end of the day, the mainstream media caught up, but I can't help wondering how much more useful Twitter could have been if there had been more interaction with the pros.

So what's the lesson? The lesson is that social media is a powerful yet not-fully-understood tool. Many of the local media outlets have adopted it in some form or another and with varying degrees of conviction. I've just been hired to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle to facilitate just that kind of community building at the newspaper.

So the future of social networking news looks bright, at least as part of the journalism process. It will be a few years yet before the Web has penetrated so deeply into the lives of Montanans that social network reporting makes much of a difference to the common reader.

Interview with Courtney Lowery from New West

Related posts:

1. The Power of Social Media Comes Full Circle in Montana
2. Dabblers go home; journalists need to be social media leaders
3. Social media snake oil
4. What Twitter did for crisis journalism today
5. Have a reason for using social media techs