fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 10.27.2009

When Michael Jackson died, I knew it meant something important for journalism but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

A pivotal moment in international history – more so for what is becoming modern journalism. Michael Jackson’s death crashed the L.A. Times server AND Twitter with constant reports, retweets, fakeries, etc. of his death. The L.A. Times even changed its front page story several times. Newsday beat them with the factual reports by piggy backing on a hunch from TMZ.com while their server was exploding and for us competitive journalists, someone in NYC beating someone who lives on the spot is kind of rough.

Long story short, the Internet was a freaking mess and Twitter was at the top of it all. If you’re a journalist who still denies the importance of Twitter, please follow along carefully.

Twitter was aptly named a Din by my friend Nick who is still struggling with the relevance of Twitter. He said that when big news breaks, it’s important because people find out about it but it then becomes impossible to communicate anymore. The average life span of a tweet goes from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Then stories get made up, lies spread and everything falls apart in an earth-sized game of Telephone.

He’s right. So Annie and I sought to answer, “What do journalists do with the din?”

Journalists spread #truth. Right?

More specifically, we believe it’s our job to tag retweets with #truth, #untruth to direct the din.

Annie and I reenacted the death of Michael Jackson with me playing the L.A. Times reporter with just an iPhone (which I recently purchased and suddenly see this whole new world) and her playing my editor at the L.A. Times newsroom.

I walked up to the imaginary doctor and interviewed him using my Evernote (btw, you need this if you’re a journalist, not just for iPhone) voice recorder. He told me Michael Jackson was in critical condition.

When I hit save on Evernote, it automatically uploaded the sound file to the web. Annie has access to my Evernote account and watched it load live, then saved it to her computer, briefly trimmed it down, uploaded it to SoundCloud.com (YouTube for audio) and Tweeted the sound clip embeded on the L.A. Times website with a nutgraf.

Total time for first breaking news report: 10 minutes

While I waited in the waiting room, the editor and I coordinated my and the L.A. Times tweets using a synced Tweetdeck (iPhone app + her desktop app). I tweeted extra details while the editor spread the word.

As people retweeted accurate  news, we retweeted them with #truth. If you do it right, #truth becomes the trending topic and you’ve accomplished your life goal as a journalist.

People who lied (or abused the hash tag) were retweeted with #untruth so that people would ignore them and continue to retweet our reports.

I then dictated a brief update story to my editor via the phone (which allows me to talk and use apps at the same time) to provide a link to our website to plug into the twitter-fall.

My editor Direct Messaged people who were retweeting the truth to tell them about the #truth tag purpose to ask them to continue following us and retweet us with #truth so they could enlarge our sphere of influence.

L.A. Times suddenly became the most credible source and the fastest and the most dynamic.

Lather, rinse, repeat until Michael Jackson’s death was announced.

As I drove back to the newsroom, my editor continued to #truth the hell out of Twitter while our IT guys figured out what the hell happened to our servers.

I returned, wrote my story and the rest is history. All the while, kicking the hell out of Newsday and TMZ.

Point being, there is something journalists can do to navigate the Twitter fall, at least we think there is. Imagine the application of something like this when a reporter is not on the scene. You can gather information and spread the #truth from primary sources (once varified). Try it, see if it works. I hope to see some #truth spread out there and some #untruth quelled.