Here's how reporters use Twitter

Twitter has signed a deal with MTV. The two outlets will have the stars cover the upcoming Video Music Awards. Top of the tweets will be an MTV Moonman (pop culture’s ‘Oscar”) from Las Vegas. Woa... Insiders say it will provide a huge boost for Twitter’s image. Twitter conducted a similar stunt a while ago at a social networking event which is why social web 2.0 marketers appear to be the largest users of the tool.

Talking about prominent Twitter users, many high flyers are Twittering these days. Even some that first said it is a waste of time. One example is the journalist David Berlind at ZDNet. He says that it took him ages to think positively about Twitter but that at the moment he is Twittering all the time. His Tweet is over 2,500 words, among the longest around. What happened to him? He puts it down to cunning business sense. "Like blogging, I see Twitter more as a disruptive Web publishing tool with ramifications to existing media business processes than I do as a way to find out when and where my friends are going to lunch and how much indigestion it gave them after."

That is increasingly what other people are deciding too. Twitter headlines include banks and financial institutions even. For reporters Twitter’s the usefulness is evident, and the Tweets of journos are among the more interesting, with some people Twittering as they break news.

These are some interesting feeds by people who twitter about their journalistic adventures most of all:
http://twitter.com/fieldreports is interesting because it features the work days of a German freelance journalist.

http://twitter.com/GroundReport is the twitter by the Groundreport guys, who run a grassroots reporting site. In their Twitters they focus on journalistic issues.

http://twitter.com/JohnMone takes the Yank approach and addresses his audience; ‘...Good morning. Do you remember murderer so and so?...’

If you are a reporter on the lookout for interesting comments from people on the ground in a particular situation and you know the location, check out http://twittermap.com, which allows you to track down where Twitter users on a big world map are and what they are saying. By zooming in and reading the little Flagged Tweets, distributed dot by dot, you might find very valuable stuff if you are in need of someone complaining about a train delay or a person raving about an event/festival/local grocery store/vegetables market. It takes some figuring out how to work the site, but it’s worth it!

Various news services are putting their breaking news stories on Twitter too. This is quite useful if you are at risk from missing a story because you’re sat there twittering...

http://twitter.com/SkyNewsUK
http://twitter.com/bbcbreaking
http://twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn

www.Twitigg.com is a site that keeps track of all the newsstories, videos and other multimedia material listed by Twitterers, and ranks them by the times they were mentied as well as voted popularity.

Disclosure: The author of this article is involved in the launch of a newsroom for freelance journalists using Twitter. The reality-style reporting site is called www.reporTwitters.com. Feel free to visit.