More about using Twitter

As we at The Gazette are getting better about using Twitter to communicate with readers and each other, I’ve been thinking about more ways that reporters can use Twitter.

My feed went crazy for the past two weeks, with people sending out near-real-time reaction tweets to both political conventions. If you’re a political reporter and aren’t following those kind of people, you’re missing out on a real wealth of sources.

And even for local issues, it’s a great way to get reaction to big happenings. Simply ask a question to your local followers and they respond. You can gauge if the issue matters or not, and if it does, you can try to turn those followers into sources.

Don’t know where to find local people to follow? Try Twellow, a search engine that compiles where people are from.

Twitter is constantly evolving. How are you using it differently now than you were six months ago?

She forgot step six: die of exhaustion

Allison Gow had a really good post about all the ways we can use Web 2.0 in our reporting, broken down in five steps.

Now if you did all of the parts of every step for every story, you’d be accused of not being productive enough. But I think reporters could learn a lot about the different ways to find and disseminate information, and there’s a lot of really great ideas in the post.

So what have you done to bring your reporting more into line with Web 2.0?