Twitter vox pops: What journalists learned from 2007

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 December 2007 at 08:00
Tags: twitter

For today’s issue of Press Gazette magazine — the last of 2007 — we asked journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and websites to tell us the things they have learned over the course of this year.

We also tried a little experiment in gathering vox pops via Twitter, the text message microblogging system, to describe “What I learned from 2007″ within Twitter’s 140-character limit. Here are some of the responses we received:

kevglobal: This year I learned how to break news using Twitter.
Kevin Anderson, blogs editor, Guardian Unlimited

sambrook: That social networks are like new cities and its important to be there…
Richard Sambrook, director, BBC Global News

nmcintosh: Playing the long game is fine.
Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development, Guardian Unlimited

radioproducer: lesson: was again humbled by the courage of bloggers who helped us make radio in difficult and dangerous circumstances
Chris Vallance, journalist, BBC Radio 4 “iPM” and 5 Live “Pods and Blogs”

jemimakiss: Expressive presence, applications, openness, aggregation, virtual worlds, recommendation, trust and social graphs. Oh, and brevity.
Jemima Kiss, new media reporter, MediaGuardian.co.uk

adders: That teaching social media to anti-social old hacks is good for the soul, if not the heartburn…
Adam Tinworth, head of blog development, RBI

paulbradshaw: High school shootings and firework bums on YouTube. News sites launch MyEverything. Audiences go hyperlocal and international. Facebook frenzy; MySpace misery. The end of paywalls?
Paul Bradshaw, Senior lecturer in online journalism, magazines and new media, Birmingham City University

robbmontgomery: “The world is smaller; Email to Paris, Flickr to Cairo, Twitter to Stockholm. The world is bigger thanks to new friends discovered in 2007.”
Robb Montgomery, Chicago journalist and the CEO of Visual Editors.

Frontline: 106 media workers killed, 127 journalists & 64 cyberdissidents imprisoned. Iraq still the deadliest country, China still the leading jailer.
Vaughan Smith, The Frontline Club

Let us know what you learned from 2007 — unlike Twitter, there’s no 140-character limit in the comments below.

Tags: twitter