Podcast: Social media critical to reporting a story

Daniel Victor said social media, and Facebook in particular, were crucial to his ability to gather alumni reaction to the news of a local school being slated to shut down.

Word recently came that the Pennsylvanian government wanted to axe the Scotland School for Veteran’s Children because of budget issues. The school serves at-risk children of veterans, but closing the school would save the state $10.5 million.

Victor’s assignment was to go out in the community and to talk to people about the decision to close the school and also to get in touch with alumni to get their reactions. Normally, this wouldn’t be that easy of a task to do, but thanks to social media, Victor was contacted by dozens of people who wanted to share their stories and reactions.

“It was absolutely critical,” Victor said about using social media to help report this story.

He sent out a tweet and got a few responses on Twitter, but Twitter wasn’t nearly as big of a help as Facebook was. Victor found an alumni group for the school on Facebook and joined the group. He explained what his story was, and he left his cell phone number.

One of the alumni who read his message on Facebook sent out a text message to an alumni network that helped spread the word about Victor was doing. Soon he was contacted by 48 alumni who wanted to be interviewed, and he was able to interview almost two dozen of them.

“They ended up doing the work for me,” he said. “It’s amazing how much of a difference it made for my story. Everybody had a stake in it, and for them to all be in one place, and for me to have access to that, that’s pretty powerful.”

Victor regularly uses social media for crowd sourcing. When news happens, Victor looks to get the news up his paper’s breaking news blog and Twitter ASAP.

“That’s kind of an accepted part of my reporting,” he said about Twitter. “If something is going to be breaking, I’m going to check with my network.”

Because Victor is much more accessible now with social media, he gets a lot more tips. Recently, somebody alerted him to an accident with an EMS responder, where the driver had heart attack. Because of Victor’s online networks, the Patriot-News was able to get that story quicker than they would have otherwise been able to.

“People just kind of know that I’m available to them,” he said.

Recently some bank robbers got loose and were being chased all over the Harrisburg area, Victor said. Roads were being closed, and the story was quickly developing and changing. Victor was able to monitor in real time people’s reaction’s on Twitter.

People were discussing which roads were closed, what the best detours where, analyzing the news and more. The Patriot-News was unable to keep up with Twitter for breaking news, Victor said.

“I kind of equate Twitter to the police scanner, the way that the police scanner kind of gives us this constant monitoring of what is happening in the cop world, he said. “I feel like Twitter is giving us a constant taste of what is happening in community news.”

Some other topics discussed:

• How has your ability to harness social media changed within the last year now that social media is becoming a lot more popular?
• Which beats are best suited for Facebook?
• And more.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.