News Leadership 3.0

February 22, 2011

Covering breaking news around the world: Lessons from Andy Carvin’s Twitter experience

For over a month now, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has been tweeting almost nonstop to share news and context about the revolutions sweeping several nations in North Africa and the Middle East. What lessons can news organizations and journalists learn from his experience about how to prepare for good curation-style coverage of breaking news?...

By Amy Gahran

On Feb. 21, NPR’s All Things Considered aired an interview with Carvin: The Revolution Will Be Tweeted. Here are a few highlights, and takeaways for news orgs and journalists.

Start with sources you know. Carvin (who currently has nearly 30,000 Twitter followers) was able to quickly pick up on the news in Tunisia and Egypt, and figure out who to trust, because he already knew people in those countries. “I already had a half a dozen or so contacts there who I was already comfortable retweeting,” he said. “As time goes by you get a sense of who they trust, who they’re retweeting.”

Carvin noted that in Libya, often people there are posting to Twitter information that they’ve received via phone, e-mail, text/photo messages, or personal conversations with people they know in other parts of that country. If you’re not sure whether a tweet represents firsthand or primary source information, try checking with the person who posted it via an @reply.

Keep your compassion. Libya presents a tough challenge for sorting out fact from rumor. “There aren’t many people there who are on Twitter, and there are rumors that the service has been shut down there altogether,” Carvin noted. “Almost all people in Libya who are tweeting are doing it anonymously. They’re clearly scared for their lives and the lives of their families.”

Furthermore, conflicting reports from Libya on Twitter should inspire compassion, not frustration, in US journalists: “You’ll see two different people on Twitter saying exactly contradictory things. You really have to take some of it with a grain of salt,” said Carvin. “Realize that these people are doing their best. They’re not professional journalists. They’re just trying to get info out as quickly as possible.”

Connect with US expatriate communities. The Libyan expat community in the US proved very helpful to Carvin, who says he “essentially had to start from scratch” to develop sources there. So developing strong ties and good relationships with key groups and people in local immigrant and expat communities, just for your regular news coverage, could offer special “reality check” benefits in covering an international crisis as it unfolds via social media.

“I know some people in the Libyan expat community here in the US, and they’ve been helping me piece together online contacts and who’s who,” said Carvin. “Often, what I’m hearing from backchannels through them seems to reflect what people are saying publicly on Twitter. Usually a few hours later you hear mainstream media sources essentially quoting the same thing.”

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Amy Gahran, 02/22/11 at 12:48 pm
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I read that Twitter is on the second place in list most innovated company. You can read about it in Paper. I think it’s very interesting.

By Annabelle, 02/23/11 at 11:01 pm

I have no doubt that google has its eyes on twitter, that would be a online coup of sorts. This North Aftrican market is on the cusp of exploding, and I can’t help thinking that all online companies should get their Arabic departments ready to go, so those that really need it could even do stuff like check their euro millions lottery results in their own language.