Poynter journalist Steve Myers is using Twitter to cover the Republican and Democrat conventions this election season and he writes today about the various ways users can utilise Twitter to get the inside track on the conventions.

Myer has created a Twitter account called DNCjournalists (he is the early stages of establishing one for the Republicans, which will be called RNCjournalists), that will aggregate Twitter updates about the Democrats from other journalists at the conventions.

He also reports that C-SPAN's Republican and Democratic convention sites will display any Twitter updates (called "tweets") that contain the tags #DNC08 or #RNC08. All Twitter user can participate in the forum.

The National Press Club recently announced a Twitter training session and ended up training 29 people, some of whom will tweet from the conventions.

Journalists are using Twitter in a variety of ways, some are using it to push their stories and others use the service to comment on what's going on in the news or to seek comments on their work. Plus, they can simply use it to answer the question "What are you doing?"

Myers believes that this is one of the most interesting things about Twitter; he says that although the platform and the purpose seem to be quite limited, the service can be used a number of ways.

Source: Poynter Online

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