Twitter-Based Coverage of the Olympic Games

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 starts with Jennifer Jones, whose focus is also on Twitter: she was an embedded journalist at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. There is a significant historical connection between the Olympic Games and technology, and new media have been especially prominent in recent years; there has been substantial growth especially in alternative media coverage (by non-accredited journalists and others). In Sydney, there even was an alternative media centre for the Olympics.

Independent media were prominent in Vancouver, too – people set up their own media centres, and printed their own unauthorised media passes, which were eventually tacitly accepted as valid media passes. The more people printed their own passes, the more ‘official’ they became. A number of Twitter lists (official, as well as fan-curated or adapted) were set up to aggregate the various alternative journalists covering the events.

The main periods of Twitter action during Vancouver were the opening and closing ceremonies, as it turned out, with various #hashtags being created. Jennifer captured the activities of specific Twitter lists around particular hashtags – for example of artists tweeting during the closing ceremony, or of media activists discussing some of the critical themes surrounding the Olympics. With alternative media, there was a lot of talking at and amongst themselves, too.

The next point of focus is the London 2012 Olympics, of course; it will be interesting to see what happens on Twitter then. Even the IOC now has its official Twitter account, and of course there will be activists engaging in critical and protest actions again, too, and various independent media organisations will have a presence again. Indeed, Jennifer is involved in setting up an alternative media centre for citizen journalists at the Olympics.