Heidi Moore on How Journalists Use Twitter

“Daddy, how do they make the news?”

In the olden days, an editor would call the troops into his office on a Monday and tell them what was going to be front page news the entire day Tuesday.  The story would be written and the headline would be crafted and the front page would be designed.  The issue would go to print that night and be delivered by the trucks during the wee hours of the next morning.  And that story that the editor selected the day before was the first thing you saw at the newsstand for the whole next day.

And then a brachiosaurus would stomp on it on his way to a Jurassic-period watering hole.

The news now works differently.  I decide what’s news in the financial realm.  You decide what’s news.  The people who consume the news decide what the news is by how much or little they’ll echo the headlines and share the content on their blogs, tumblrs, twitters, stocktwits, facebooks etc.  Online articles now regularly feature comment sections below them like blog posts.  News organizations now break news on Twitter under the corporate handle for all of their followers to see, concurrently with the headline hitting the newswires.  Journalists make sure to retweet the important stories that didn’t get much attention the first time around to the cognoscenti who follow them.

This is what’s happening now and newsrooms and reporters that were hoping it would go back to the way it was need to make some changes or just retire.

My feed is one third traders/investors, one third financial media/journalists/reporters and one third rappers.  I know, I’ll grow up at some point.

Here’s my Twitter Sister Heidi Moore, bureau chief for American Public Radio and former writer for the WSJ and the NY Times, explaining how she shares and is shared with on the digital news dissemination platform that is Twitter…

Ever since I discovered Twitter – I mean, really discovered it, without scorning it – I have loved it as a news feed. For me, it replaced my daily use of the Dow Jones Newswires, the Bloomberg headlines, and the Reuters terminal as well as multiple visits to WSJ.com and NYtimes.com to hunt for stories. Good stories are tweeted by their publications, retweeted by their reporters, and then retweeted again by followers who find them interesting. I use my Twitter feed as an aggregation tool as well as a commentary on news, and as a way to hear from readers – or at least, readers who tweet – what they think about financial news and stories. (And cute animal pictures, such as this slideshow of otters, which was my 50,000th tweet – and, appropriately, a retweet.)

One thing I love about Twitter is its engagement; it’s not just a way to share news, but also to share jokes and reactions to it. It’s also a way to give credit to reporters who do great work that deserves attention, and to occasionally point out missing context.

Keep Reading:

My 50,000th Tweet: Arrogance Kills (The Truant Muse)

Follow Heidi (if you’re not already!) here:  @moorehn

Follow me here: @reformedbroker