Twitter and News
Local news is struggling to reinvent itself in the era of digital information -- which means now is the time for innovation. Our news coverage has to be more immediate, interactive and digitally integrated than ever before.
Because most of our resources are usually more focused on our broadcast coverage, I've noticed ATVN doesn't seem to have as much traction on its social media and web pages than its Neon Tommy counterpart - but over the past few weeks, we've been doing some work to help change that.
For example, for "Sibling Day" we took to Twitter and asked for people to send us pictures of them with their brothers and sisters, and we got WAY more responses than we expected. I quickly learned to never overestimate the power of a tweet.
This week we used Twitter to provide live coverage on President Obama's Affordable Care Act speech, to tweet links to our stories, and simply to let the world know the latest on our weather anchor's hair and makeup (all equally vital news, naturally).
The things we can still improve on, however, are abundant: We need regular communication between web supervisor and lead producer, for one. We still need to remind reporters to tweet at @atvn throughout the day. And we need stronger cross-promotion between our Neon Tommy and ARN sister orgs.
After all, keeping up with social media is no longer an option -- it's the only way we can ensure we won't be broke and homeless in 10 years.
