Breaking Tweets organizes endless Twitter stream around major world news
Anyone with reporting experience knows what a pain in the ass it can be to find good quotes for a story. Put the event up for discussion around the world and watch as “difficult” turns into a full fledged nightmare.
DePaul University grad student Craig Kanalley wants to make opinion quotes and eyewitness accounts easier to wrangle. His site, BreakingTweets.com, uses Twitter and a group of editors to format news stories in an unusually interactive way that provides quotes for
other journalists.
It starts with an editor, who writes a one or two paragraph explanatory intro about the story, then come the tweeters, who send opinions, analysis and eyewitness media. Editors cull the best and most insightful tweets from the bunch, as well as occasionally interjecting with their own updates.
“I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject,” Kanalley said.
More importantly though, it’s a model you can use for your own blogging. Whether your blog is geographically anchored or just subject-specific, the Breaking Tweets method translates to hyper-local blogging easily. Use it to enmesh your own authorship with reader opinion, to collect media and organize the endless comment stream that is Twitter.
Below you’ll find an interview with Kanalley about where Breaking Tweets came from and how his team is making it work:
Lily: Where did you get the idea for Breaking Tweets?
Craig: I first thought of doing something like Breaking Tweets on Nov. 4, when I saw the amount of people twittering about Election Day and how Twitter can serve as a place for breaking news, very personal feelings and eyewitness accounts.
I didn’t actually follow through on the idea until Jan. 31, 11 days after I attended Barack Obama’s Inauguration in D.C. That event got me even more excited about Twitter. And following what people in Australia were saying about the Australian Open on Jan. 31 put me over the top — I finally created the Breaking Tweets blog. It was meant to be a personal blog at first but quickly grew into something more. We’ve had 35,000 page views since the site launched and visits from 116 countries.
