“It adds a completely new way to communicate at a meeting,” he said. “There are side discussions and questions for speakers and people not at a meeting get a very real sense of what’s going on. Who knows if this is going to be a flash in the pan or something that will change the way people communicate? But it sure is fun.”
Meanwhile, during a session titled “Starting an Online Magazine,” Science News editor Tom Siegfried predicted that Twitter will go the way of the CB radio.
“I do not see the lasting value of Twitter,” he explained later. “I do not see that a large number of people will find a large amount of value in spending a lot of time looking at a lot of tweets.”
Siegfried also said it’s unclear where online science journalism is headed, adding that “a lot of what’s going on doesn’t have a lot to do with journalism. It has to do with technology or style. Getting news reported well is being subordinated to a concern with technology.”
Gillmor, on the other hand, is the voice of optimism and enthusiasm about the future of digital media, calling the current situation—with its declining print ad revenues, closing newspapers, and burgeoning online news outlets—a phase of “creative destruction.”
“But we’re also in an amazingly constructive phase,” he said during a talk. “We’re in a period that maybe we should call ‘messy’… but I’m so sure that we’re going to come up with something wonderful that I don’t worry about it anymore.”
One innovative new Twitter tool that Purdue University researchers unveiled earlier this month was made available for use at ScienceWriters 2009. Designed to help make sense of the wave of Twitter traffic at a meeting or conferenc, a new site called Need4Feed sorts through the tweets at a meeting and builds a popularity ranking to identify those with the broadest appeal. Developer Kyle Bowen, director of informatics at Purdue, said in a university press release that “Need4Feed lets conference goers sift through the noise to find the important things being said.”
The Purdue site showed that, as of last night, science writers tweeted almost 1,700 times about the Austin conference, with NCI’s Wang in the lead (164). The most popular links shared were a social media graphic and an animated U.S. map showing fossil fuels carbon dioxide emissions that was a hit on YouTube. One of the most popular overall was a compliment from keynote speaker Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor): “Want to talk with an intelligent audience? Try science writers… wow.”
But lest you think that science writers are too high-minded, it’s good to keep in mind that the most popular Sunday night re-tweets focused on where to get great Indian food in Austin (try the Clay Pit) or draft beer (how about the Ginger Man pub on Lavaca?). Science writers, after all, still have those key journalistic instincts for a good story, a good meal and a good watering hole.
Editor’s Note: To follow the Twitter stream from the ScienceWriters 2009 meeting, go to Twitter and type in hashtag #sciwri09. The authors’ Twitter feeds can be found at @robinlloyd99 and @russellcris. To get more information about the live streaming video from the New Horizons meeting, go to casw.org (it will be archived in the near future). Lloyd and Russell helped organize sessions at the science writers’ workshops on social media; Russell is also CASW president.
[Clarification: This post was changed to reflect the fact that 30 percent of the Wired Science blog’s social media traffic - not total traffic - comes from Digg and another 30 percent comes from StumbleUpon.com.]
I've been home waiting for the imminent arrival of a baby boy, and so I had the opportunity to attend the science writers' meeting via Twitter and streaming video.
I found that while I didn't get comprehensive info from Twitter, I did get a distinct feel for each talk, including whether the presenter seemed to hold the audience and whether the talk was something I wanted to pursue later by watching the archived video.
Twitter, if it were more pervasive at science and journalists' meetings, could be a great pointer to subjects of interest. This morning I was able to file a post for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker while monitoring the Twitter feed and using that to occasionally check in on the video. I could cover a lot more meetings if I were able to dip into a Twitter feed while taking care of daily deadlines.
And while we're all excited about Twitter, I wouldn't discount the value of web video. The tweets from the NASW journalism workshops on Saturday made me really sorry that those workshops weren't also being streamed.
As Tom Siegfried of Science News said (I think I got this from a tweet), we risk getting caught up in technology and forgetting that what we're really about is solid, old-fashioned reporting. He's right. But the technology, if we use it properly, can clearly, in my view, help us attain that old-fashioned and honorable goal.
Paul Raeburn
Program director, New Horizons in Science
#1 Posted by Paul Raeburn, CJR on Tue 20 Oct 2009 at 12:12 PM