There was a time when I thought Twitter mostly made sense for large and national beats, with readers who were tech savvy.

After all, if your readers aren’t on Twitter, what good is using it? Well, I was wrong.

Wichita, Kansas is not a tech hub. It’s not known for being particularly bleeding edge with technology or Web adoption. It has a median household income of about $40,000, and Kansas is around the national average with regards to the percentage of people over 25 with college degrees.

This doesn’t sound like the greatest test bed for a social networking service, Twitter, that only has a few million users worldwide, who are largely concentrated in wealthy, educated areas in major cities (D.C., New York, San Francisco and the Bay area, London, etc).

Nonetheless, Ron Sylvester, a court reporter for The Wichita Eagle,  has found great success with Twitter. The thing is, his readers don’t have to have Twitter accounts to enjoy his tweeting. All that is required for Sylvester to be successful with Twitter is for him to harness the platform well.

Sylvester uses Twitter to cover court trials live. People love being able to read what is going on and why, especially at major trials. Most of those people will never join Twitter, but that doesn’t stop Twitter from being immensely useful for Sylvester.

One of the keys to harnessing Twitter well for information dissemination is realizing that a Twitter feed can be embedded onto virtually any Web site. People can consume Sylvester’s Twitter feed in a variety of ways:

• People can go to Twitter.com/rsylvester and view his feed. Sylvester does not make the mistake of protecting his feed. He allows anyone to view it. Yes, there are people who follow his beat that are on Twitter, but a lot more people are glued to his Twitter feed even though they don’t have Twitter accounts. During court trials, people love his live tweets.
• On his blog, What the Judge Ate for Breakfast, users can find his Twitter feed embedded on every page. As people navigate around his blog they’ll find a continuously updating stream of news that Sylvester is publishing via Twitter.
• People can subscribe to his Twitter RSS feed. Many, many more people use RSS readers than use Twitter. Beat reporters can just make another subscribe to button with a link to their Twitter RSS feed.
• People can view his Twitter feed when he embeds it into blog posts or onto his newspaper’s Web site. Sylvester can make a blog post that says, “Today I’m covering this trial live. Below you’ll find updates throughout the day from the courtroom.” Sylvester can then embed his feed right into that blog post.

Think about this: Let’s say you’re covering a big event, you have several written pieces about the event, have some video and are posting live updates.

All this information could be placed together in a single blog post (or on a page on your Web site, CMS permitting). The post could link to each written piece, with a description. Video content could be embedded onto the page, and the live Twitter feed could be embedded as well. This way people can grab all your content in one convenient place.

Etan Horowitz, a technology columnist and blogger for the Orlando Sentinel, on the other hand has many readers on Twitter. His beat covers a topic that has a lot of overlap with Twitter, and many of his readers aren’t even in the Orlando area. He often asks questions on Twitter about people’s tech habits, which help him write stories and blog posts.

It’s a different use than Sylvester’s. Both are using Twitter in ways that make sense for their beats. Horowitz can use Twitter to help him find sources and information for his reporting, while Sylvester uses Twitter as a major tool for reporting information.

They are starkly different uses, but both work very well. Horowitz, by the way, also embeds his Twitter feed onto his blog. For Horowitz, this can be a great way for readers to know that he is on Twitter.

Always keep in mind that social networking services like Twitter, delicious, Publish2, YouTube, Viddler, etc usually allow their content to be embedded onto other sites. This makes these tools much more powerful and flexible for journalism. Embedding content allows journalists to have conversations on and off site, while also allowing their content to reach broader audiences.

Even if most of your readers will never understand or use Twitter, you can still effectively use Twitter to help report.