Twitter as a Tool for Pro-Am Journalistic Practices

Seattle.
Wow – we’ve already reached the final session on the final day of AoIR 2011; time has passed very quickly. I’m in a session on Twitter, and Gabriela Zago makes a start. Her focus is on the possibilities of Pro-Am news media work on Twitter, focussing especially on the newspapers The Guardian and El País.

New tools and Web services appear online all the time; these tools are appropriated in different ways by different social actors. One possibility is appropriation for news-related uses, pursuing Pro-Am collaboration opportunities. Such Pro-Am models combine professional journalists and amateur news users and produsers. Twitter is currently being appropriated in this way – this is a form of extending news media for multiplatform news delivery as well as for other purposes.

Gabriela observed the daily tweets by the two newspapers for a period of one week in July 2011; these tweets were examined for the presence of hashtags (which were both topical and emotive – e.g. ‘#NotW #jawsdropping’ - from The Guardian, while ElPaís used more topical hashtags by adding hash symbols to key words in its tweets, and responded to FollowFriday mentions), as well as for the types of communication present (including calls for participation, and conversation with the public).

So, Pro-Am practices are evident in invitations to the public to collaborate and communicate, as well as in hashtags which encourage the wider public to use those hashtags as well; such simple Pro-Am mechanisms indicate a widening of journalistic practices, and a more comprehensive incorporation of such practices into the overall journalistic process.