15 tips for newsgathering via Twitter
I gave a talk to political journalists covering the UK election at Twitter HQ last week. Here’s a slightly adapted version of the Twitter newsgathering tips that I shared.
1. Create your own lists
I’m often surprised how few journalists create and use Twitter lists. What’s the benefit? If like me you follow more than about 500 people, your home feed can be busy. By creating lists around specific topics you can set up a niche newswire on any subject.
Take this oil and energy list by my colleague Georgi Kantchev, for example. Georgi joined The Wall Street Journal a few months ago and created this specialised feed to use in Tweetdeck (which he could also use in an app such as Tweetbot).
Remember, lists can be public (so other people can follow them) or private.
Stay focused on a topic. I think the first list I ever created was one called ‘journalists’. This was fairly useless as a list as it simply gave me a newsfeed that was far too broad to be useful to me as the list members were tweeting on a broad range of topics.
Related: A great case study in newsgathering via lists from Henk van Ess.
2. Follow other people’s lists
As with the first tip, this might seem obvious to many. I’m including it here as again, I’m always surprised as to how few journalists benefit from a fellow Twitter user’s curation. But how to find lists that are useful? One tip is to consider who might have a useful list. When I first joined Journalism.co.uk, an obvious person to have a good list of innovative thinkers in digital journalism was Jeff Jarvis. I hopped over to his profile and sure enough found Media Wonks, a list I still return to from time to time. Also see points 3 and 4.
3. Look what lists a source is a member of and follow the trail
Imagine you are reporting on Ferguson from afar and you spot a newsworthy tweet.
One way you could find other potentially useful sources is by looking at the lists this person is a member of. I see that he is a member of a number of lists. I quickly find this particularly useful list curated by Derek Bowler from Storyful. I can subscribe and add the list to Tweedeck and have a dedicated Ferguson wire with minimal research.
It seems it is now harder to see list memberships via Twitter.com.
You can see list memberships using Tweetdeck or type ‘memberships’ at the end of the Twitter user’s URL.
https://twitter.com/search4swag/memberships
4. Storyful has some great lists
As a social media editor at a global news organisation known for its world news, I have to zone into a new region on an almost daily basis. My first step is almost always to find a Storyful list and add that to my Tweetdeck.
Storyful, a social news agency, has a list for every country in the world. The lists are comprised of journalists and trusted sources on the ground. Storyful also curates lists around other useful topics.
When the Pope was in the Philippines, an area from where I previously followed next to no one, I opened the Philippines list and the Vatican list; when the Copenhagen shootings happened I soon found the Denmark list a rich source of information. When news of Charlie Hebdo broke, I was aided by looking at what French journalists and trusted sources were tweeting; when the Germanwings plane crashed on Tuesday, I opened three lists: the Germany list, the Spain list and one on aviation.
When the Bardo attack happened in Tunisia I opened the Tunisia list twice: one column to show all tweets, another to show tweets with photos (see point 11).
5. Consider having a changing list
I’m not sure how common this is or even how useful that it would be to someone who has a narrow news beat, but I have a ‘changing key news list’ that I add to and remove from on an almost daily basis. When a news event happens and I find a particularly useful source, often from a Storyful list, I’ll add that person to this focused list. It’s the first list in my Tweetdeck and the most useful.
My changing list is an eclectic mix of people and currently contains sources from Yemen, Kobani and Ferguson. I try and keep it focused by removing people. So when the cafe siege was taking place in Australia I had news sources in the list whom I have since removed.
6. Search for lists using Google
When I was preparing for a WSJ training session last month I was able to screen grab and demonstrate how to search other people’s Twitter lists. This feature introduced exactly a year ago seems to have disappeared. A shame as it was really useful. I’m therefore reverting to advice I shared before the now defunct feature was added, and offering this search tip for finding lists via Google.
site:twitter.com/*/lists/MPs
If you know how to site search and other Google operators, it should make sense; if you don’t, you may want to jump to this blog post for an explainer.
7. Consider copying lists using the List Copy tool
I recently came across this List Copy tool, created by a student. In the spirit wanting to encourage a good Twitter culture, I’m suggesting following other people’s list rather than grab and go, but this could come in handy.
On a side note, I copied over Derek’s Ferguson list (see point 3) and it was noticed.
8. Use Twitter Advanced Search
A useful starting point for searches, particularly if you haven’t got to grips with operators (see point 9), is Twitter’s Advanced Search.
You can search by location and time frame, for example.
9. Use Twitter Search for location searches
Did you know that Twitter has a Google-like search page? You can use this as an alternative to the search box in Twitter.com or the one in Tweetdeck.
One thing you can do is a location search, which are beneficial to journalists. If you know a particular tweet was sent from a location, you know that source is on the ground and this helps in verification. The downside is that only 4% of people geolocate their tweets (Joanna Geary from Twitter tells me 4%; I see it’s given as 2% in this study on Twitter and ISIS).
A really useful operator is the near:xxx within:xxmi search. A search for near:ferguson within:5mi will give me geolocated tweets sent within 5 miles of ferguson, for example.
10. Learn to love operators
In addition to the near command, a link on the Twitter Search page details a number of other operators. And the more you use them the more useful they will become.
At the election event I spoke at last week, Joanna Geary used the example of this search (it may have been slightly different but it was this idea):
list:democlub/candidates-2015 to:davidcameron ?
What does this provide? It gives you tweets containing a question sent by any candidate standing in May’s UK general election to David Cameron (Democracy Club’s list of candidates is here).
Twitter Search is great if you are on a one-time hunt for information, but having a search like the ask David Cameron one set up as a Tweetdeck column is probably more useful as you will notice as questions are asked (also see point 11).
11. Embrace Tweetdeck filters
“If you take one thing away from this talk,” I told the political hacks gathered at Twitter, “it’s embrace the Tweetdeck filter.”
There’s a complete guide to using Tweetdeck here with more on the filter. You can set this to only show tweets in a particular language, exclude false positives or only show tweets with images, for example. Tip 14 is a use case.
12. Set up Tweetdeck searches based on URL
In addition to the wealth Tweetdeck of column searches you can have based on operators, you may also consider a Tweetdeck column based on a URL. At the ONA London event earlier this month, Malachy Browne from Reported.ly shared such an example.
I don’t remember his exact search but it went something like this (though not based on this list). It was based on a list of ISIS supporters with the search set up for video OR فيديو (video in Arabic) AND the justpaste.it domain, a site ISIS uses to post material such as videos. Malachy explained that a combination of this search with an alert (see point 13) was how was alerted to the release of an ISIS video purportedly showing 21 coptic Christians.
13. Use sounds and popups (and use the Twitter app alert)
You may well find that it is sufficient to take a cursory glance at most of your Tweetdeck columns a couple of times a day. But what if you want an alert immediately, as soon as a parliamentary candidate asks Cameron a question or when an ISIS supporter shares a justpaste.it link? Within Tweetdeck you can set a popup and / or sound to alert you when a new match is made.
You may simply want an alert when an individual tweets. For example, on the day of the solar eclipse, I set up an alert for tweets sent by Christin Kristoffersen, mayor of Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s biggest settlement, which was one of the locations to experience a full solar eclipse. I knew she would be sharing video and was keen to embed in a blog post.
An alternative way to find out when an individual tweets is to use the Twitter app to get a push to your phone.
14. Use the Tweetdeck engagement filter to find memes
When I spotted people commenting on Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s ill-timed photo shoot in French magazine Paris Match, I saw the potential for a roundup of the best comments on our Brussels blog.
To find the best I drew on Twitter’s human algorithm, filtering and finding the tweets that were the most retweeted. I entered the search term Varoufakis OR @YanisVaroufakis and used the filter to show only tweets that had been RTed more than 30 times. I also selected to only show only tweets with images, to give me a visual blog post. I could have also used the filter to show tweets that had been favorited by at least 10 people, for example.
15. Search bios using FollowerWonk
I added this tip to the talk last minute after talking to an attendee from Sky News who reminded me of the usefulness of being able to find an “entrepreneur in Sunderland”, for example. There’s no easy way to search Twitter bios within Twitter so that’s where third-party tool FollowerWonk comes in.
Related: Joanna Geary’s guide on using Twitter to cover the election.
