Editors’ Corner

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter lately, and the North County Times has started using the service. But what is it? And how can you use it?

From Twitter.com:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Tweetnet.com has a more detailed explanation, along with good links to more resources:

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”

How we’re using Twitter

NCT has a Twitter page at www.twitter.com/nctimes. The online staff will add updates or “tweets” throughout each day with headlines and links to full stories. If you have a Twitter account and “follow” the NCT page, you can log on to your page and see our tweets.

I have been using my personal Twitter account as something of a news aggregator. I am following several local and national news organizations in addition to my favorite sports teams and some journalism groups, and this means I get a steady stream of headlines to my account home page. When I want to read more about a story, I simply click through.

Two things to know about navigating Twitter

First, people can direct their tweets to a certain person by using the expression “@username.” For example, I may be hungry and tweet “Who wants to go for pizza?” One of my friends might respond to me “@tracy — I do! Make mine pepperoni.” By using the @ symbol followed by my username, I know their tweet is intended as a response to my tweet.

Second, Twitter users have developed a way to easily find tweets related to a particular subject by using the expression “#word.” This “hashtag” using the pound symbol makes it easy to search for related tweets from everyone across Twitter, not just your followers. For example, during the recent presidential inauguration, people at the event or just talking about it used the hashtag #inaug09.

Send us your news!

NCT is using the hashtag #nctimes to solicit news tips from Twitter users. Are you sitting on the 78 because of a bad accident? Your kid’s classroom is closed due to mold? Tweet about it and add the hashtag — we’ll get the info to a reporter to follow up.

Follow us! www.twitter.com/nctimes

How dumb is this:

Even as television proliferates in choices (the 500 channel problem) and total viewership (even though the individual channel slices are shrinking), the newspaper industry has devoted gobs of expensive newsprint to promote their chief competitor.

What else would you call a television listings book but layer upon layer of free promotional material advertising what’s on CBS or AMC or ESPN at 8 p.m.?

Unfortunately, newspapers never figured out how to cash in on this great giveaway and now that newspapers are trimming or eliminating television books, their readers are blaming the newspapers.

In fielding about 150 complaints this week, I haven’t heard a single complaint lodged against television itself for not providing an easy to use listing service.

Figures.

This week has been an object lesson in the concept that there are three kinds of owners of a newspaper: The owners by title; those who write, edit and produce the paper; and, mostly importantly, the readers.

In this case, an attempt to trim costs in the newsroom by eliminating eight pages from the weekly TV book (the movie synopses were cut out) has sparked at least 150 angry telephone messages mostly by older readers.

Their complaints are mostly that television is their primary source of entertainment and that they have no other source of information to see what movies they may wish to watch, being part of the pre-computer demographic slice.

The anger is justified — nobody likes losing a useful and favorite feature of the newspaper — but in the end may not be assuaged.

The savings in newsprint is equivalent to two reporters, and pushed to that choice I would rather have reporters.