Twitterers aflutter as the social media comes alive

IN this era of media fragmentation, there’s nothing like a big story to bring back the masses.

Newspaper sales and television audiences spiked last week as the nation clamoured for news from the Victorian bushfire fronts and began the debate about what happened, how, and what can be done to prevent a repeat of the disaster.

It was also the first time, as far as I am aware, that a new technology was seriously field tested in Australia. The micro-blogging facility Twitter also showed a significant spike in traffic.

Twitter is one of those inventions that was designed to do one thing, but ends up doing something else. It was meant to be a kind of shorthand social network, where Twitterers could send their friends short messages (tweets) based on the initial premise: what are you doing now?

There is a 140-character limit on each message, which means you can’t say very much because this sentence is the extent of your allowance.

No doubt there are those who use this facility to keep in touch with their friends, especially when the tweets are diverted to their mobile phones as text messages.

In this sense Twitter sits alongside MySpace and Facebook in the emerging world of social networking which is, in itself, a youthful phenomenon, the purpose of which older folk find hard to grasp. But Twitter has also been adopted by others with less personal motivations.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull both send out tweets telling the faithful of their announcements, which could be quite good fun. Imagine KevinPM composing a 140-character tweet saying “I’m spending $42 billion but I’m still an economic conservative”.

I’m told Kevin doesn’t actually compose the tweets himself, but has a staffer do it for him. Malcolm, on the other hand, is said to be a prolific and personal tweeter. I signed up for Twitter this week and quickly received an email telling me KevinPM was now following my tweets. As if.

Twitter is receiving serious attention for another use: news reporting. When the American Airlines jet crash-landed into the Hudson River last month, first news of the incident is said to have been via a tweet that answered the “What are you doing now?” question with: “Just watched a plane land in the Hudson”, or words to that effect.

Caroline Overington, a reporter from The Australian, headed into the bushfire zone last week encouraged by her online editors to file Twitter reports. She says it took her longer than expected to master the technology—“They say you can do it in a couple of minutes, but it took me about 24 hours to become comfortable with it”—but was soon firing off the first of her 197 posts.

If she used her full allocation of characters, Overington’s snippets of information would have totalled about 2500 words, or more than double the number in this column. Individually, her tweets could not say much; collectively they built into a fast-moving coverage of a massive human disaster.

Is Twitter the way of future reporting? Who can tell? Its reach, at this stage, is quite small with a quoted figure suggesting just one in 5000 mobile phones are Twitter-enabled at present. But it has all the elements of a fad—a must-have accessory for geeks—which could quickly drive worldwide growth into the tens of millions.

The service is popular among news junkies and journalists because of its capacity to be the source of instant tip-offs and immediate information.

Overington’s tweets were being followed in newspaper, radio and television newsrooms because she was giving out information that affected their operations—which roads were closed, the location of fire hot spots, and where people had congregated to console and support one another in their loss.

Twitter is also a two-way system. Overington received feedback from hundreds of readers, including one which said, “This is your mum”. Surprised, because she knew her mum was not techno-savvy, she checked.

“It wasn’t mum,” she says. “So clearly we need to check everything we receive, but it is certainly an interesting way to approach reporting.”

For those of us following events in more traditional ways, the week followed a traditional pattern. Last week’s Sunday papers were a bit flat-footed, but that’s what happens when big stories break late. It may have taken the fireball only 30 minutes to wipe out Marysville at 6pm on the Saturday, but it takes longer to marshal the facts, get the pictures, and get papers on to the streets.

I was in South Australia at the time where The Sunday Mail splashed with a wall-of-flame picture and a pointer to “40 dead—see page 12-13”.

Clearly, given more time and a greater understanding of the extent of the carnage, editor Megan Lloyd would have cleared the front of the book rather than filling the first convenient hole.

By Sunday, everyone was in overdrive. Seven’s new Sunday Night program had co-host Michael Munro in Whittlesea where pickings were still relatively slim. He had some good survivor footage, but not much of it. But when Munro reported that newsreader Brian Naylor and his wife Moiree were missing, you could almost feel the collective intake of breath around the nation.

From Monday on, all media were offering blanket coverage, spurred on by the erroneous belief that the Victorian fires represented the greatest natural disaster in our history. It was not. That sorry title goes to Cyclone Mahina, which caused a massive tidal surge in far north Queensland in 1899, killing more than 410 people.

By Saturday, the colour writers were out in force, their accounts giving a kind of full point to the end of the first week. From now on the focus will shift to recovery and the royal commission into what happened and why.

The week’s events were neatly bookended by Claire Harvey in The Sunday Telegraph, who reported on the anger directed at journalists in some of the devastated communities. This is a frequent occurrence when survivors tire of media intrusion into their grief. It goes with the territory, and it is a reaction that should be compassionately understood, but not allowed to divert the media from doing its job.