Statesman team uses Twitter to cover Hurricane Ike
On Wednesday, the Austin American-Statesman started a new Twitter account to track Hurricane Ike: @trackingike.
Reporters Marty Toohey, Tony Plohetski and Patrick George, and photographer/videographer Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon (who Twittered about Hurricane Gustav as @trackinggustav; he has renamed the account @digitaljournals) all updated @trackingike from Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, Beaumont. Internet editor Robert Quigley provided updates, support and answered questions from Austin. He explained that the journalists split into two teams, starting in Corpus Christi, then Houston. Both teams went to Houston for the landfall. One team moved to Galveston on Saturday morning. The other team went to Orange/Beaumont, then back to Houston at night. Hurricane Ike made landfall at Galveston at 2:10 a.m. Saturday.
@trackingike provided a great service and information hundreds of followers, and drove a great deal of traffic to the Statesman Web site. Quigley sent the following note to the Statesman newsroom:
Twitter (http://twitter.com/trackingike)
- We received 270,000 page views from people clicking through to our links Thursday-Sunday.
- We posted 420 entries on Twitter.
Marty Toohey, Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, Tony Plohetski and Patrick George all contributed constantly to the Twitter feed. They posted their observations, I posted links to blogs, videos, photos, etc. I also responded to readers through the account and “retweeted” interesting info (a way to pass along info from other people on Twitter through out account).
We started the Twitter account on Wednesday morning, by Saturday, there were 1,280 followers, many of them from Houston. I was told through Twitter by several people in Houston that our Twitter feed was their only source for Hurricane news.
People gave us great positive feedback on what we were doing on Twitter, too. Read the feedback here: http://twitter.com/TrackingIke/favourites
The New York Times “The Lede” blog was quoting our Twitter posts: http://tinyurl.com/3vx7ox
We started the Twitter account on Wednesday morning, by Saturday, there were 1,280 followers, many of them from Houston. I was told through Twitter by several people in Houston that our Twitter feed was their only source for Hurricane news.
If you haven’t already done so, take a look at the detail and wealth of information the @trackingike team provided.
- Other newspapers also used Twitter to track Hurricane Ike:
- Houston Chronicle: @chronhurricane (Updated via Web)
- Miami Herald: @mh_hurricanes (Updated via Twitterfeed)
- Star-News: @snohurricane (Updated via Twitterfeed and Web)
- The Tampa Tribune: @tbostorm (Updated via Web)
- The Times-Picayune: @hurricane_ike (Updated via Twitterfeed)
As mentioned before, Quigley and the Statesman really understand how newspapers can use Twitter.
- Posted by Erica Smith at 09:28 pm / Permalink for this post
- Filed under: , Austin American Statesman, Twitter
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They did a great job twittering as they entered Galveston on Saturday. They used twitter extremely well to convey the damage and the impact of Ike. I’m hooked.
Twitter’s a great way to cover a storm. The posts are inherently small – less reading – and you can catch up with all the varied information in one spot after a long day of waiting in gas and ice lines. -Houstonian
[...] me preface this by saying that I used this post by @ericasmith as an example in my Big Meeting with the newsroom. In it, she touts the wild success [...]
Someday soon, newspapers are going to be duped — badly — because of Twitter’s non-policing of false/duplicate identities. The Rocky Mountain News already has suffered great blows to its reputation because of its inability to use Twitter properly.
Pseudojournalists who continue to grab at fads such as page design — long ago exposed as a fraud and of no value in any way, shape or form to credibility or circulation — and Twitter are showing their ignorance. Stop the cheerleading and learn some objectivity.
[...] think I was reading a post by the awesome Erica Smith in which she mentioned that the Austin American-Statesman had set up a special Twitter feed for Hurricane Ike, which [...]