Small Texas newspaper the Daily Sentinel employs Twitter to publish breaking news alerts on its Web site, and Online Editor Matthew Stoff and Lead Developer David Durrett have shared a tutorial, including code, explaining how to create the Twitter widget. "If you can send an e-mail," they say, "you can publish breaking news."

Stoff and Durrett devised the Twitter widget as a solution to a newsroom problem: because publishing online required Web staff's technical expertise, breaking news would often go unpublished until certain staff members were available. "We wanted to take advantage of Twitter's ease of use so that reporters and editors with little or no training could post headlines quickly without special software and without having to memorize a technical process," the tutorial explains. "The resulting method uses e-mail as the interface for posting short headlines (which are actually Twitter messages, or 'tweets') to the Web site."
Once the modified Twitter widget is installed, reporters can use e-mail, through the computer or their cell phones, to send "Breaking news" text alerts directly to the Web site, where they will pop up at the top of the page (like all Twitter messages, the alerts must be 140 characters or less). In an e-mail interview with Poynter, Stoff said, "As a result, we've been much more flexible about getting intermittent updates published quickly. I'm referring to new facts that don't warrant an entire rewrite by themselves, but help to flesh out a breaking news incident."

Many newspapers have faced similar problems as they try to shift their newsrooms into the world of the Web: reporters with journalistic expertise do not always have the necessary technical expertise to make the change. Stoff and Durrett's Twitter initiative is an interesting solution because instead of retraining the entire news staff in web publishing, as some publications have done, they have devised a web tool that makes the job easier for reporters. As they have provided step-by-step directions for setting up this widget, other publications can benefit directly from Stoff and Durrett's innovation.

Publishers might also keep in mind the broader idea, which is that the benefit of Web publishing does not have to be only about the reader's ease and usability. Features like the Daily Sentinel's breaking news widget can also contribute to the staff's ease and efficiency in web publishing. How else can publisher's harness the usability Internet to help their reporters make this transition?

Source: Poynter, DailySentinel.com