Electric Fishwrap

Ron Sylvester has a great analysis of his Twitter experiment on Technolo-J. I must admit I was one of those people hitting refresh as much as time allowed. At times watching the tweets roll in was addictive.

One day, I cut and pasted all my “tweet” updates into a traditional story file. It measured 80 inches. Now, I don’t think anyone would have read an 80-inch story from the newspaper on this trial, as compelling as it was. My editors certainly wouldn’t have run a story that long. But what I found is that people will read an 80-inch story, given to them a paragraph at a time, 140 characters long.

Man, I’m cringing about a 30-inch story I am writing for Monday, yet people were glued to his tweets (when Twitter was up in any case). And he didn’t just sit there and tweet all day. He also did multimedia presentations for the Web site the next day:

Between the text descriptions from the courtroom over Twitter, and the multimedia, we were able to give people a feeling of being there that I had never before been able to do in my career. This trial had a “press room” in the law library of an adjoining courtroom.

Watching Ron tweet inspired me as well. I started tweeting on April 30, back when he posted about Twitterlocal. Right then, I decided to try Twitter and see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been sorta tweeting about school board meetings as they happen on Twitter. My newsroom has a Macbook with a Verizon Internet card, which is awesome for researching past stories, file during meetings and saving a ton of time because I have my notes typed out. (Ever want to hit ctrl + F to search your paper notes? But I digress.)

I should also mention Ron Sylvester is running for president-elect of SPJ national.

Last year Ron Sylvester blogged for his newspaper’s Web site for the murder of a small-town sheriff (EDIT: Added link). I read along as the trial unfolded, and it was incredibly riveting. But sometimes it took a while for blog posts to appear on the Web site due to editing resources.

This time, Sylvester is covering another murder trial. The copy desk said “no more.”

People are going on vacation. We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

Like any journalist with a passion, he thought around the problem. He started posting updates on Twitter. Usually his paper doesn’t cover jury selection, but this time they did. It was a capital murder trial. He wanted to know who was going to be on the jury.

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The Shelby Star in Cleveland County, N.C. is far ahead of the tech curve as far as most newspapers go. Their new gadget, the Star Car, is an amazing mobile newsroom.

What is the Star Car?
The Star Car is a mobile interactive newsroom. Reporters drive it to wherever something is happening that you need to know about, turn on the equipment, and they can report live online.

You can even track the Star Car and see where it’s been, and there’s an in-dash camera so you can watch the car as it’s on the way to news! How cool is that? How incredible and innovative!

The Wichita Eagle in Kansas also used some technology to blog about a murder trial — live from inside the courtroom. In this incredible post by the technolo-j blog, the reporter explains his work process during the trial.

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