The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A | June 2009
News in Brief
Craig Kanalley offers international reporting on the cheap.
By Lily Quateman
Funding international news coverage is expensive bordering on impossible. It is so costly, in fact, that the fear of losing original reporting on the under-funded Web has become a loud and constant source of whining from old media loyalists.
DePaul University grad student Craig Kanalley wants to make opinion quotes and eyewitness accounts easier to wrangle, even when the developing story is halfway around the world. His website, BreakingTweets.com, uses Twitter, a group of editors and a limitlessly large pool of international contributors to format news stories in an unusual, interactive way.
It starts with an editor, who writes a one or two paragraph explanatory intro about the story. Then come the tweeters, who send opinions, analysis, and eyewitness media. Editors cull the best and most insightful tweets from the bunch, as well as occasionally interjecting with their own updates.
Breaking Tweets will not give you the same comprehensive coverage you get from a newspaper with a foreign office full of professional journalists, and Kanalley realizes that. But it is free, provides eyewitness accounts, and just landed him on the UWIRE 100 list of the top college and grad school journalists.
How does Breaking Tweets fit into the greater framework of journalism/new media?
It’s a new type of journalism. I haven’t seen anyone doing anything remotely close to this besides Global Voices, but they focus more on blogs. Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer-form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.
People all over the world are commenting on news stories and in some ways reporting themselves. They just need someone to sift through all of that mess and create some meaning through a filter that gets rid of the spam and nonsense.
Does the Twitter form limit you?
Not at all. Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, just like quotes that journalists use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.
People also like that they don’t have to spend a ton of time going through stories. So for now we’re weeding out tweets that aren’t as compelling and trying to limit it to the best ones. Four to six tweets is ideal. It gives enough flavor for the story, especially if those tweets are from the region the news is occurring.
Where do you see the site going in the future?
The format we currently use that treats tweets as quotes has worked well, and that’ll probably be at the core of whatever we do. But in the future, our content editors will be interacting more with users through Twitter to probe for more information and eyewitness accounts.
We also want to develop our niche content better. I’d like the site to be useful to people who aren’t particularly interested in world news. We’re growing, and we’re launching niche affiliate sites soon: Breaking Tweets Sports and Breaking Tweets Entertainment. We want our comments to go through the roof, for people to be active and to tell us, “hey, give us some forums and more places to have the discussion.” Our focus is always content first and the people will come.
Tell us about Breaking Tweets tweeters. Where do they come from and how do they contribute?
Some parts of the world use Twitter more than others, and that’s our biggest hindrance. But in the future, we’d like to develop affiliate sites for specific cities and provide just tweets from that locale. For now, it’s mostly people commenting on events, but we are growing a network of followers through Twitter from all over the world and have been utilizing them as tipsters to get closer to the scene.
Eyewitness accounts can be tough because, like I said, not everyone has Twitter. Plus, you have to be careful to verify what people are saying. We do the best we can with that and at times we have to discount a certain tweet because it doesn’t appear to be authentic.
We want to make this a journalism project first. We look for people who at the very least understand how to construct a story in a journalistic way—essentially how to model stories after what we post now. It’s basically a 5-10 sentence set up and then into the tweets with occasional updates from editors.♦