For Samford Crimson journalists

Students watch Sen. Barack Obama's speech.

While Sen. Barack Obama was on stage turning into the president-elect The Samford Crimson newsroom was covering the event locally.

Just a few minutes after he walked off the stage the Email alert was shipped out and a story was uploaded that included a photograph, seven paragraphs and three quotes in a nice team effort that helped capture Samford’s slice of an historical moment.

Nice job!

We’re going to soon be talking about this a lot. We’ll discuss ways that we can think beyond the newspaper paradigm and how we can use the tools already in place to help you develop audiences, cultivate brands and how that will ultimately help your portfolio.

One such little idea is by using Twitter. Here’s a post from Amy Gahran about Twitter for journalists:

Twitter can be quite an effective radar screen for news or relevant issues.

[...]

Twitter can help you engage people on a personal level, and to demonstrate your interest in them. This is something that, IMHO, many journalists resist — but that can benefit journos and their work significantly once they loosen up about acting like human beings in a public venue.

Twitter is going mainstream now. Early this year I started the Twitter stream at al.com. In a matter of days we had more than a hundred followers — when few people around here were on the service. In the first week we broke two big fire stories via Twitter …

Gahran’s also got tips for how you can get started — which I’d encourage you to do. I’d also encourage you to follow (to follow is to friend if you’re in a Facebook frame of mind) relatively talkative people. Follow those who fall into your interests and they’ll tip you off to ideas and great new things.

Also follow a few people of different and varied interests, just to get a nice slice of the conversation.

You can follow me too, if you like.