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The Rockford Register Star regularly covers board meetings via Twitter, following up with traditional stories for print and web. The live Twitter coverage is well recieved, particularly by a younger audience than their traditional print readers, reports Assistant Managing Editor Anna Derocher.
"I was out Saturday night, and I had a group of young professionals tell me they look forward to following our tweets from school board and city council meetings. They get the play-by-play with color and, for them, is more entertaining and efficient than watching the meeting on TV (or attending it) or reading a full-blown story. They often get behind-the-scenes stuff that they retweet and talk about the next day at work. That's exactly what we wanted to accomplish with our tweets," she writes.
WHAT THEY DID: "We tweet from most if not all city, school and county meetings. The reporter will blog that they're tweeting and what they're expecting to happen at the meeting. They share their hash tag. We redirect to the blog post before and during the meeting and replace with story version after the meeting. Cathy's blog post and story version got about 1,000 page views combined. Reporters know to use hash tags (and we have a bit of a system so they know what to use before they go out) so we can sort meeting-specific tweets to our home page and/or through Zope stories."
THE TAKEAWAY: Twitter can not only add another layer to your story, but can reach a different audience than either your print audience or your web audience. In addiiton, you can include things - color, background, asides - that don't always make it into traditional stories, but add depth and interest to your coverage. Including a link to your Twitter stream with your traditional story will let your web readers know that they can follow your coverage live next time.
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