Minneapolis Michael

How Twitter Changed My RNC Experience

You don’t think twitter is a game changing media tool? Think again.

My intention yesterday was to go down to the RNC to peaceably assemble and see what kinds of people the protests were going to turn out. Early in the morning, the Pioneer Press reported that organizers were still expecting 50,000. I have a Blackberry Curve from AT&T and use the TwitterBerry mobile client to read my feed. Seeing as how I don’t have any real-life friends using twitter, I am still getting used to follwing people I don’t know and figuring out how twitter is going to fit into my daily media consumption habits. I follow people for various reasons: i) to see how local MSM is using the social networking site, ii) to follow the political discussion happening on twitter and iii) to see how people outside of the MSM and technology sectors are using it. For the last two reasons, I have been following @coldsnaplegal and @webster as they have been doing a nice job documenting breaking news about the RNC raids and Permaculture bus seizure, respectively.

I went to the protests by myself, as two friends bailed at the last minute because they didn’t think turnout was going to be as big as expected. I got down to the Capitol around 10 and proceeded to start checking my twitter feed because it was really boring at the Capitol and I knew there had to be something newsworthy happening somewhere. Surfing the Internet on my Curve is less than satisfactory, so my twitter feed was the only news source I was using. I started to see tweets from @coldsnaplegal making the case for me to be elsewhere, so not knowing the layout of Saint Paul very well, I met up with a fantastic lady named Jane when I saw her on the street looking for a fun place to go. Since she knew St. Paul well, we took off; her on her motorized scooter and me jogging. We found some good gawking at John Ireland and Kellogg and stayed there for a bit until watching those crazy rogue protesters do their thing grew tiring. One interesting sidenote: there were many, I would guess 30-40, bystanders looking on in the same manner Jane and I were. These were, typically, people in their 40’s and 50’s and they were not constantly checking their phones for information. Did they just stumble, by chance, upon the happenings? If not, then how were they getting their media coverage? By this point it was probably close to 1pm and Jane wanted to take off to see the main march. I continued to check my twitter feed to find more tweets from @coldsnaplegal. Blah, blah you get the point I am trying to make: my experience turned out differently because I used twitter as my primary news source, which was a mistake as news travels fast on twitter and cannot be easily substantiated.

Now, why hasn’t the local MSM warmed to the idea of using twitter the way it, in my eyes, should? Every local media outlet needs to do what the Pioneer Press is doing. By using their twitter account as a place to post links to stories and place them in context, it gives me a credible local source AND they are looked upon favorably by the twitterverse. WCCO is starting to get it, but have a long way to go to. As far as I can tell, KARE, KSTP, FOX9 and the Strib aren’t even aware of twitter. I will leave you with one anecdotal piece of evidence: As I was at a street corner downtown Saint Paul checking my feed to see where the next hotspot was, a reporter showed up from an outlet that shall remain nameless asking about an incident that happened 20 minutes earlier and 4 blocks away. As I listened to a couple of people give interviews, I was off to tweet about the next hotspot of roving roguish retards. Local MSM: either figure it out or die trying.