Snapshots from the Edge: A look at new ideas in online newspaper publishing
By Beth Lawton

Twitter users have described Twitter as "addictive". Newsweek's technology writer Steven Levy called it the "viral craze du jour". Presidential candidates are "tweeting" or "twittering". And now newspapers are getting in on the trend, too, by using Twitter to send news headlines.

Twitter is a cross of text messaging, instant messaging and blogging. Some call it "status blogging," because instead of long posts, Twitter users (called "twitterers") can only post messages up to 140 characters long – the common limit for cell phone text messages. A post in the early morning might be "getting coffee," for example.

Here's how it works, according to Twitter: "When you send Twitter a mobile text (SMS), it gets sent out to your group of friends and also saves to your Twitter page. Your friends might not have phone alerts turned on so they might check your web page instead. Likewise, you receive your friends' mobile updates on your phone." Twitterers can also post updates through the Twitter Web site at www.twitter.com. The Twitter service is free, but mobile phone companies may charge customers who receive and send Twitter updates on their mobile phones. There are options to receive updates from other twitterers (the updates are sometimes called "twitters" or "tweets") only on the Web or through instant messaging programs rather than over a mobile device. The service has grown popular enough to have its own Google map mash-ups, forums, blogs and more.

Odeo, part of San Francisco-based programming company Obvious Corp., launched the service in early 2006. But it wasn't until March 2007, during the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival that the program really took off. The company engineered a major publicity boost by setting up large screens at the festival displaying Twitter updates. At the same time, Twitterers gave the program copious praise and word spread quickly.

It was very soon after the SXSW Interactive Festival in March that news companies such as CNN and CNet's News.com began sending out headlines and links to stories via Twitter in an effort to reach tech-savvy readers in a new way.

According to an online map of active twitterers (based on geocoding tweets) from the University of Maryland eBiquity Research Group, Twitter is especially popular on the east and west coasts of the United States and in Japan and Europe. (Other Twitter-map mash-up sites to explore include TwitterMap.com and TwitterVision.com.)

Most twitterers use the service through their mobile phones, said Damon Kiesow, managing editor of online at The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph. That information hinted to Kiesow there may be a market for breaking news or niche content headlines through the service. The Telegraph is one of the first newspapers in the United States to push headlines or other information through Twitter. (See The Telegraph's Twitter feed here.)

Kiesow said Twitter is another item to add to the newspaper's portfolio of products and a new, interesting way to give readers "different ways to access our content when and where they want it."

Mark Friesen, online editor for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore., agreed. "I'd played around with Twitter a bit on my own and thought it could have some interesting applications, especially given that you can get Twitter updates pushed to your mobile phone. Getting, say, traffic alerts on your phone could be pretty useful," Friesen said.

The Oregonian started using Twitter in early April as an experiment, or "proof of concept," Friesen said. "It might not drive a lot of traffic in the scheme of things, but I think newspapers need to be looking at ways to get their content out to people in a variety of channels beyond the newspaper Web site."

Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia at the Knoxville News Sentinel, another newspaper experimenting with Twitter, said traffic to his personal blog has increased modestly thanks to Twitter.

"I haven't seen any Twitter driven spike on Knoxnews, but my personal site has a small enough audience that it is being affected by Twitter. That makes me think that an approach that links to newspaper blogs or niche sites or "cool things" we're doing might be most effective," Lail said.

Lail said part of the appeal is that he enjoys "trying new things just to see what sticks or how an audience interacts with a new ‘tool'." (See the News Sentinel's Twitter feed.)

Other newspaper companies pushing headlines through Twitter include The New York Times. In additino, the (Spokane, Wash.) Spokesman-Review is looking into the program. Chicago Tribune's RedEye is using Twitter to promote events and contests. Each newspaper has its own page on Twitter.com. Each newspaper's profile page includes the twitterer's lastest posts, a listing of "friends" from whom the twitterer receives tweets and a list of "followers." (Click on the newspaper name above to access the company's Twitter page.)

As of mid-April, the technology news site News.com led with almost 300 followers. CNN had more than 250 followers, but – as of this writing – hadn't tweeted in more than two weeks. The New York Times had 137 followers and tweeted several times each day.

"One of the keys to this," Kiesow found, "is being able to update it on a regular basis." Initially, Kiesow worried that in the course of breaking news, no one would remember to update the Twitter feed if it had to be updated through the Twitter site. But when Kiesow found a PHP script online that could link the newspaper's Twitter updates to their content management system's automatic RSS feeds, Kiesow decided to forge ahead with the experiment.

Twitter is still primarily a new toy for the tech-savvy, so the number of people using the service is still small compared to other social networking services. "I have a suspicion that if it breaks out beyond the web-savvy crowd that's given it a lot of recent buzz, it'll be because people find really useful applications," Friesen said.

The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph had 11 followers when Kiesow spoke with NAA – and he personally knew most of them. But, Kiesow said, the newspaper did not market or promote the service at all while they were testing Twitter, and only started to promote the service for it in mid-April on the breaking news blog and on its Web notes blog.

The Twitter map mash-ups don't show a huge number of twitterers in New Hampshire Kiesow said, but there are many just over the border in the Boston area, and there were enough twitterers in the Nashua area to encourage Kiesow and his staff.

In the early stages of this experiment, that's good enough.