Jaclyn Schiff

Do You Follow Breaking Tweets?

by Jaclyn Schiff on 05/05/09 at 6:53 pm

I love the idea of BreakingTweets.com. This is exactly what journalists should be doing with Twitter. Here’s some information from the site’s About page:

The site has two main goals: 1. to help people enhance their worldview or perspective of global events; 2. to increase dialogue about international news and make the world smaller through conversation and interaction, both on this site and on Twitter.

The philosophy behind the site is “hyperlocal gone global.” There is an emphasis on what is happening in a specific place at a specific time and looks at how people are reacting to that event(s) in the area.

Barbara Iverson recently wrote about the site–which launched at the beginning of this year–for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits:

[Breaking Tweets] is associated with the account Twitter.com/breakingtweets, but it takes Twitter messages to a new level. The site has just added Breaking Tweets Entertainment and Breaking Tweets Sports, and will soon add Breaking Tweets Chicago…

Breaking Tweets has human editors who manually select messages for inclusion in their stories. Furthermore, the editors treat the Tweets like quotes, weaving the 140 character missives into a comprehensive story on a news topic.From a “virtual newsroom,” the team keeps connected via e-mail and online.

Last month, BeatBlogging.org’s Lily Q interviewed BreakingTweets.com founder Craig Kanalley, a journalism grad student at DePaul University (the staff listed on the Breaking Tweet’s site mostly consists of journalism students).

Kanalley tells Lily that he first got the idea for the site after he “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.”

A few more snippets from Kanalley:

Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, they are just like quotes that journalists would often use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.

Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.

See the full interview here.

Don’t let the name fool you though, Breaking Tweets is not intended to “break the news.” In a blog post, Kanalley writes, “The point of the site I put together is to chronicle the biggest news around the world each day and put a Twitter spin on it by personalizing the news through tweets.”

But the site actually did scoop the BBC and CNN last week.  Read more about that here.

Breaking Tweets logo/BreakingTweets.com