Five links from 2011: 'Twitter'

I am picking out a few of the more interesting links from my 2011 delicious bookmarks. On Monday, I selected five from my 'war reporting' tag. 

Today, I've selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled 'Twitter' in my delicious account. 

Enjoy!

1. 'Visualising the New Arab Mind'

Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence network around the revolution in Egypt.

2. 'The man who tweeted the attack on Osama Bin Laden - without knowing it'

In May, computer programmer Sohaib Athar provided Twitter updates of the US mission to kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Athar was unaware of the significance of what he was tweeting at the time but he knew something was up:

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."

The Washington Post collected his tweets using Storify. 

3. 'Taliban join the Twitter revolution'

Meanwhile, Twitter's rapid uptake by all and sundry included the Taliban in May and Somali insurgent group Al Shabaab by December. 

A rather surreal interactive war of words online now accompanies serious military activity on the ground as ISAFMedia and alemarahweb engage in disputes over Afghanistan while HSMPress take on Kenya's military spokesperson Major Emmanuel Chirchir.    

4. Libya air strikes: NATO uses Twitter to help gather targets

"Potentially relevant tweets are fed into an intelligence pool then filtered for relevance and authenticity, and are never passed on without proper corroboration. However, without "boots on the ground" to guide commanders, officials admit that Twitter is now part of the overall "intelligence picture"."

5.  British Prime Minister considers curbing Twitter use after UK riots

August's riots in the UK prompted consideration of whether the use of Twitter and social media should be restricted.

As it turned out, BlackBerry Messenger appeared to be the communication tool of choice and recent research by the LSE/Guardian claims that Twitter was more useful in the aftermath to organise clean ups than to incite disorder. 

Five links from 2011: 'War Reporting'

This year I bookmarked at least 530 links on delicious. I know that because I try to tag each bookmark by year - I'm three hundred or so links down on last year's total of 854.

Seeing as we're coming to the end of the year I thought I'd pick out a few of the 'best', 'most interesting', 'memorable' or simply 'random' links on various topics from among the 530.

In this post, I've selected from those that are also tagged 'war reporting'.

1. Sebastian Junger remembers Tim Hetherington

In April, photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed while reporting from Misrata in Libya. Colleague and friend Sebastian Junger reflects on his life and death:

"That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things."

2. Libya conflict: journalists trapped in Tripoli's Rixos hotel

"It's a desperate situation," [the BBC's Matthew] Price told Radio 4's Today programme. "The situation deteriorated massively overnight when it became clear we were unable to leave the hotel of our own free will … Gunmen were roaming around the corridors … Snipers were on the roof."

3. War, too close for comfort

Simon Klingert talks to some people on a train about his life as a photojournalist:

““So have you ever seen someone die?” It was about two minutes into our conversation when the question had popped up. The question. Not that I minded though. After all, it seems like a natural question to ask when you tell people you’re trying to make a living as a war correspondent and it dawns on them you actually like what you are doing..”

4. The hazards of war reporting from behind a desk

BBC journalist Alex Murray reflects on reporting the conflict in Libya from his computer screen:

"But the war has been very close to me, too close sometimes. Viewing them [videos from Libya] in a corner of the newsroom on a screen with nobody else sharing the experience at that moment is a dissociative experience. The process of analysing it, effectively repeatedly exposing myself to the same brutal events, does not make it easier."

5. Image of the child of fallen soldier trends on Facebook

I typed 'Afghanistan' into the Kurrently search engine one day and noticed that this photo was being passed rapidly around Facebook in the United States. I find the photo jarring and unsettling: the artificial neatness of a homely, yet staged photograph here represents the tragic consequences of a chaotic, complicated and distant battlefield.      

Ghosts of Afghanistan: An interview with foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele

At the back end of last month, I spoke to foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele about Afghanistan for the War Studies podcast. I've embedded it below in case you missed it.

Steele's new book, Ghosts of Afghanistan, compares the experiences of Russian (1979-89) and US/NATO (2001-) forces in Afghanistan.

He argues that President Obama can learn from how Mikhail Gorbachev began withdrawing Russian troops in 1988.

In Steele's estimation, Obama should be pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and other parties with more vigour.

Election Monitoring Crowd-Sourced in Egypt

From the New York Times' Lede blog:

"Although some prominent Internet activists decided to boycott Monday’s elections in Egypt to protest continued military rule, many well-known bloggers spent the day working as self-appointed election monitors. Using the same social media tools that helped them to force Hosni Mubarak from office, the bloggers posted images of long lines at polling places and passed on reports of apparent violations of the electoral code."

Twitter for journalists: @fergb: Lose the egg and harvest Twitter lists (#Newsrw)

"Don't have an egg [as your profile picture] on your Twitter page", says AP journalist Fergus Bell.

Like Neal Mann, Bell is also a keen Twitter user and his focus was on the importance of building an open trustworthy relationship with people and the utility of Twitter lists to assist his journalism. 

Rather than following lots of people from his personal account, he said his preferred strategy for newsgathering was to establish a series of Twitter lists using HootSuite.

He also believed that it was more useful to monitor "quality sources" instead of following people simply "because they were interesting".

This strategy enabled him to avoid "the clutter" that would build up in an individual Twitter feed.  

In a daily news environment where time is precious, Bell recommended harvesting existing Twitter lists created by other people.

He cited Twitter's own World Leader list as an obvious example of how a journalist could take advantage of other people's list-making tendencies and suggested that useful lists for nearly any news story had probably already been created.

In terms of verification, Bell said he did use tools that had been mentioned by the BBC's Alex Gubbay, (who spoke just before him), including Google Maps and Street View.

But Bell emphasised investigating "the person" behind the content. He suggested that it was difficult to "fake a social history" and advocated checking whether the content that a person had submitted was consistent with their previous contributions to the Web.

Turning that on its head, Bell also said it was important that journalists were open about their own social profile so that the 'former audience' would know that they were genuine.

He highlighted that he wouldn't run anything prior to having permission from the content owner and said it was important to "gain the trust" of potential contributors.

Hence Bell's call for journalists to lose their Twitter eggs - the default photo icon used by Twitter on sign up - and to embrace the personal aspect of Twitter as a news tool. 

Twitter for journalists: @fieldproducer on structuring the chaos (#Newsrw)

"If Reuters is your example of a solid news wire, Twitter is Reuters on acid, crack and cocaine", says Neal Mann. Often referred to both on- and offline as @fieldproducer, Mann has been building a reputation as one of the leading exponents of Twitter for news.

Mann harnesses his use of Twitter to traditional journalistic practices and values. He says journalists need to structure their Twitter use in the same way that news organisations have always structured newsgathering. 

Mann has lists for topics and subjects in the same way that news organisations have specialist correspondents and areas of interest.

He also describes Twitter as his "patch" and, probably inadvertently echoes Gaye Tuchman's "news net", when he talks about "casting a net" across the platform to find interested journalists, bloggers and news junkies.

Although he now follows thousands of sources, he emphasises standing up the story through traditional sources and verifying information.

Mann argues that merely following people on Twitter, however, does not optimise its potential. He says his newsgathering is enhanced by his use of Twitter as a news publication tool. He says journalists should be broadcasting as well as receiving and interacting with people on Twitter on a regular basis. 

By becoming a known "node" in the Twitter network he claims that people are more likely to tip him off with news stories.

He also builds an interested audience for certain seasons of his journalism. By tweeting daily links around the Wikileaks story, for example, he built a following of people who were interested in Wikileaks prior to his own work for Sky News covering the Julian Assange bail hearings last year.

Recent interesting links: BBC, journalism, blogging, social media.

BBC and Blogging

The re-launch of BBC News 'blogs' has sparked some criticism. Going after the new commenting format in particular, Adam Tinworth describes them as a "road crash", while Adam Bowie starts at the scene of the same 'accident' before turning his attention to the associated RSS feeds.

Off the back of that, an unrelated yet interesting piece of research from Canada suggests that blog readers are perhaps not as interested in the ability to comment on blogs as one might think.

Social Media and Journalism

Sky News freelancer, Neal Mann (@fieldproducer), explains how he uses social media to monitor 2,000 sources - a practice he regards as essential to his job.

His post was one in a series for the BBC College of Journalism in the build up to their Social Media Summit on Thursday and Friday this week.

Hopefully, I'll see some of you there!