“The class assignment for tomorrow is to tweet.” Nowadays, most students would love to hear that uttered from their professor. Journalism 1550 was recently assigned to live-tweet Marquette University’s presidential inauguration (to see how we did, check out my Storify). While it was a bit nerve-racking at first, our hash tags ended up trending in the Milwaukee area. If sophomore journalism students can live-tweet, what about news organizations?
One subject that is particularly built for live-tweeting is sports. Unlike the Chicago Tribune, the beat of my classmate Kyle Doubrava, CNN.com does not cover everyday sports events. They outsource that job to Sports Illustrated’s website, SI.com (SI and CNN are both owned by parent company Time Warner).
SI.com (twitter handle @SInow) has a “Top Stories on Twitter” tab on its homepage, and it also has a “Twackle” tab. Twackle (@Twackle), an SI.com network site according to SI.com, is everything Twitter and sports-- covering all the hot-topic sports stories, and allowing visitors to select specific cities and region for stories. ESPN.com wrote a story about how Twackle is changing the realm of sports tweeting, which can be found here.
A search on Twitter for CNN will bring up dozens of different CNN Twitter feeds, including CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk), the most followed CNN affiliated twitter feed, and CNN (@CNN). Twitter feeds can also be found for CNNpolitics, CNNiReport, and individual CNN anchors, such as Piers Morgan and The Situation Room's Wolf Blitzer.
CNN.com's stories also have the Twitter logo button at the top of the page that, if clicked, takes the person to his or her Twitter account, with a tweet prepared by CNN tha has a short description of the story and a link. All the person has to do is hit "tweet."
CNN is more selective with its Tweets than news organizations like the Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost tweeted 87 times September 29) and New York Times (42 tweets for @nytimes). @CNN had ten tweets that same day and @cnnbrk, CNN's Breaking News twitter feed, had just 20 tweets that day. All of these tweets included links that send people to CNN.com.
CNN covered a story in which on the side the live Twitter feed of @natlsecuritycnn was displayed. The article was "US close to adding Haqqani network to terror list," so this is a great strategy by CNN to gets its readers to read multiple articles. People interested in national security and foreign/national politics reading this article can now find right next to it tweets with links to other similar current issues.
Compared to other national news organizations ABC News and USA Today, CNN seems to be keeping pace, if not a bit ahead of the curve. Classmate Tessa Fox, in her blog about ABC News, said ABC News "doesn't typically rely on social media reporting such as live tweeting."
Another classmate, Allison Kruschke, in her blog on USA Today, wrote that "USA Today's main use of Twitter was breaking news and attaching a link to a corresponding story on their website," similar to CNN.com and their Twitter.
So while overall I was impressed with how CNN is employing Twitter, they do not do any live-tweeting on the scale that my journalism class did. This is a shame, because with all of the resources that CNN has, they could surely do a great job.
One subject that is particularly built for live-tweeting is sports. Unlike the Chicago Tribune, the beat of my classmate Kyle Doubrava, CNN.com does not cover everyday sports events. They outsource that job to Sports Illustrated’s website, SI.com (SI and CNN are both owned by parent company Time Warner).
SI.com (twitter handle @SInow) has a “Top Stories on Twitter” tab on its homepage, and it also has a “Twackle” tab. Twackle (@Twackle), an SI.com network site according to SI.com, is everything Twitter and sports-- covering all the hot-topic sports stories, and allowing visitors to select specific cities and region for stories. ESPN.com wrote a story about how Twackle is changing the realm of sports tweeting, which can be found here.
A search on Twitter for CNN will bring up dozens of different CNN Twitter feeds, including CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk), the most followed CNN affiliated twitter feed, and CNN (@CNN). Twitter feeds can also be found for CNNpolitics, CNNiReport, and individual CNN anchors, such as Piers Morgan and The Situation Room's Wolf Blitzer.
CNN.com's stories also have the Twitter logo button at the top of the page that, if clicked, takes the person to his or her Twitter account, with a tweet prepared by CNN tha has a short description of the story and a link. All the person has to do is hit "tweet."
CNN is more selective with its Tweets than news organizations like the Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost tweeted 87 times September 29) and New York Times (42 tweets for @nytimes). @CNN had ten tweets that same day and @cnnbrk, CNN's Breaking News twitter feed, had just 20 tweets that day. All of these tweets included links that send people to CNN.com.
CNN covered a story in which on the side the live Twitter feed of @natlsecuritycnn was displayed. The article was "US close to adding Haqqani network to terror list," so this is a great strategy by CNN to gets its readers to read multiple articles. People interested in national security and foreign/national politics reading this article can now find right next to it tweets with links to other similar current issues.
Compared to other national news organizations ABC News and USA Today, CNN seems to be keeping pace, if not a bit ahead of the curve. Classmate Tessa Fox, in her blog about ABC News, said ABC News "doesn't typically rely on social media reporting such as live tweeting."
Another classmate, Allison Kruschke, in her blog on USA Today, wrote that "USA Today's main use of Twitter was breaking news and attaching a link to a corresponding story on their website," similar to CNN.com and their Twitter.
So while overall I was impressed with how CNN is employing Twitter, they do not do any live-tweeting on the scale that my journalism class did. This is a shame, because with all of the resources that CNN has, they could surely do a great job.
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