Are News Organisations Your Friends? Breaking The News On Twitter

The earthquake in Chile on 27 February illustrated the differences in how news organisations use Twitter.

The greatest strength of the microblogging site is that there are few rules beyond that of the 140 character limit, leaving editors to use Twitter however they choose.

Take National Public Radio as a recent example. The American public service radio news broadcaster, like many US news outlets, has several personality-led programmes. It’s one of the big differences between American and British current affairs programming. CNN has Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, while the BBC News has Click, Hard Talk, Fast Track, World News America.

In the same way, NPR has many personal Twitter accounts, and in the wake of the earthquake and amidst tsunami warnings, its journalists put out the following alerts via their own user names:

NPR Twitter list to monitor tweets of possible interest re: Chile quake & tsunami: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Got around 50 people on the NPR #chile #quake #pacific #tsunami Twitter list, more to come: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Volunteers needed to find+add emergency resources to CrisisWiki for Chile, HI, NZ, etc. Instructions: http://crisiswiki.org

These are fine examples of solid, public service tweeting in the form of action-oriented updates which don’t cross over into its core coverage. In addition, however, the following updates from NPR appeared over a two hour period:

Rescuers Struggle To Save Lives After Chile Quake http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Chile Struck By One Of Strongest Earthquakes Ever http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Huge Quake Hits Chile; Tsunami Threatens Pacific http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Hawaii, Pacific Under Alert For Post-Quake Tsunami http://su.pr/2jUoS9
Chile Struck By 8.8-Magnitude Earthquake http://su.pr/9c3CO3
8.8-Magnitude Earthquake Hits Central Chile http://su.pr/1d5YhB

Four of these links go to the same story, one is about the rescue operation and four are about the earthquake itself.

NPR used Twitter as a kind of rolling news ticker, pounding out the same story to the same audience different URLs, sometimes with a similar headline, sometimes completely different headlines but to the same URL.

If users wanted to find out which was the main story, they would have to click the link on each update. Alternatively, they could wait half hour for the next tweet with the expectation that it might be the latest version of the story, or it could turn out to be a background piece and the updated article would be at the original URL which was sent when the story first broke.

Would the main story be the original one or the latest one? Maybe the user should just visit their NPR homepage and find the main story that way, which would involve visiting its Twitter profile page and clicking on the link in the biography.

It’s a confusing way of presenting the news, a bad user experience and one at odds with how ordinary people (and it’s still a social network) use Twitter.

If this was a deliberate strategy on the day of the earthquake, it could be due to NPR’s editors hearing the increasing number of audience members who say: “I don’t visit news websites. If it’s important, the news will find me.”

This comes up increasingly in user research and it means: “I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook and my friends will let me know if something happens.”

Despite many people heard about Michael Jackson’s death and the Hudson river crash from friends on the web, news organisations don’t act like our friends.

For a start, your friend wouldn’t say every fifteen minutes: “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.”

In contrast, here’s how Reuters covered the story (in reverse chronological order)

Hawaii prepares evacuations ahead of tsunami http://bit.ly/dxZdxN 5:09 PM Feb 27th
Factbox: Chile has history of big earthquakes http://bit.ly/b2zzn3 5:07 PM Feb 27th
Massive earthquake strikes Chile, 122 dead http://bit.ly/9WkWL0 5:07 PM Feb 27th

And that’s it. One main story, one fact box (presumably a box with which to fact me up) and a sidebar. Three stories in quick succession. There were tsunami angles a couple of hours later, but the main story went out once.

Note to editors: don’t repeat yourself on Twitter. Leave the retweeting to the audience – your followers already know what you’re saying.

News organisations have a great opportunity shape how companies use Twitter, but if they want be in the spaces where people are, they need to join them not beat them.