Jaclyn Schiff

An NBC Correspondent’s Path to Twitter

by Jaclyn Schiff on 04/25/09 at 11:27 am

These days, NBC’s Luke Russert manages to tweet on occassion, but he wasn’t always on the micro-blogging site. In fact, he was a bit of a late adopter. Eventually when he did join, he sent me a DM crediting me and anchor David Shuster with getting him to sign up.

This post, which was originally published on The Schiff Report, describes how it happened. Click here to see the original post and comments.

It was President’s Day. I was off work and traipsing around on Twitter. Ok, I guess you can’t really traipse there in a literal sense, but I was doing the virtual equivalent. MSNBC was on in the background. Luke Russert comes on. He’s interviewing Bill Clinton. I look up.

Something about advice for young people in this economy? I don’t really remember, but then as the anchor was closing out with Russert, something caught my ear. The anchor said something about how people can connect with Russert and mentioned Twitter. Russert then said something like, “I’m not on Twitter yet, still looking into that.”

Still looking into that?! That’s the sort of response I might expect to hear from a 60 year old. I hit the keyboard and in fewer than 140 characters I tweet some version of what I’m thinking:

Immediately I get some responses. A few DMs, some @replies. Some interesting tweeting ensues. Here’s a selection:

henrim @jwschiff how is that absurd? The youth population on Twitter is not at all representative the rest of youth population.

jwschiff @henrim it’s not about representation, but huge part of the Gen. Y story is technology, social media, seems silly not to monitor that part

KathleenLD @henrim agreed. The youth demographic on Twitter is not representative of youth as a whole. More tech/journ heavy than the general pop, even

jwschiff @KathleenLD @henrim don’t you think it’s a problem Russert doesn’t have access to this convo? Twitter isn’t everything, but imp. 2 follow

henrim @jwschiff @KathleenLD we are overachievers, hyper-connected, overely-political geeks… i say that in the nicest way possible.

jwschiff @henrim yes, but u don’t think with the thousands of twittr articles there’s a youth angle? and if not, that’s worth reporting too

henrim @jwschiff @KathleenLD I would gladly give up the youth angle coverage on twitter if he covers college cost/debt in more dept.

Some other thoughts:

Nextvoice247 @jwschiff he cvers youth issues as an observer & not actve participant; “sees” youth, but finds himself n role of old guard w fresh face

nishachittal @jwschiff interesting about Luke Russert. But I think most journos still dont get Twitter. Just look at @andersoncooper or @gstephanopoulos

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So @henrim and @KathleenLD have valid points. Yes, those of us on Twitter are part of a small group of the “youth” demographic or pretty much any other age group. But we’re also part of an emerging trend, and that’s a story.

But here’s the gist of why I was shocked to hear that Russert isn’t on Twitter:

As an NBC News correspondent-at-large (bio here), he is tasked with reporting on stories with a youth angle. NBC brought him aboard just as the presidential elections were heading into the home stretch and announced that Russert would cover the youth vote during the election cycle.

Social media is a huge part of some of these stories. Russert even talked about the importance of the Internet angle. Gen. Y and younger generations are notriously plugged in and spend a lot of time interacting online. A journalist who is on a youth beat needs to be monitoring what happens online, this MediaShift post raises a lot of these issues and at the very least shows that Twitter is a part of the conversation.

Twitter certainly isn’t the entire story, but leaving it out is like covering a school district and only attending official meetings. Good reporters would dig deeper. They interact with students, parents, teachers and administrators in a variety of settings. They pay attention to informal channels, off-the-cuff remarks and read between the lines.

In all fairness to Russert, he is blogging, kind of (no updates since October and very few links, posts look like articles). But seriously, I don’t know what he’s up against with bureaucracy and other barriers at NBC. Perhaps contracts and other things prevent him from being enterprising in this way, and he only graduated from college last May! He also freely admits that nepotism certainly plays a role in how he ended up in this gig — in October, he told MediaBistro, “Did my name get my foot in the door? Absolutely, I’ll be the first to admit that. But has my performance and ability got my butt through the door? Yes.”

But with all that considered, I think Russert would have been better off if he were plugged in and paying attention.