June 8 2010
Last year I had the unenviable task of finding someone to interview about the sometimes lethal practice of competitive kite-flying in Pakistan. Authorities had put a ban in place before a popular holiday, and I had spoken to one of the police chiefs in the city of Lahore. But how to find an alternative viewpoint? How could I, based in Melbourne but working for an international public broadcastr, interview a kite-flier in Pakistan? The answer, as it turned out, was on Facebook. Within a couple of hours a member of a kite-flying club graciously agreed to speak to me for the story.
Today, journalists (and people wanting to use the media to get their message across) can’t live without social networking. Some of my colleagues recently used the Twitter feed of the Free Gaza movement to arrange a live telephone interview from a person in Turkey about Israel’s deadly attack on a flotilla of aid ships. The time in Turkey was 11pm, but because @freegazaorg was being updated, my colleagues knew someone was awake. A couple of Twitter messages later, a member of the Palestinian activist group had given us her telephone number and said she could talk in the next ten minutes. The same group used their Twitter feed to refute early claims by mainstream media that the Israeli government had deported all of the activists captured from the flotilla -being in contact with the activists, it disseminated their message to nearly 10,000 Twitter followers.
But @freegazaorg also illustrates one of the dangers journalists must be aware of, when turning to social networking as a source of information or talent. When the Rachel Corrie was being tailed by the Israeli navy, FreeGaza (wrongly as it turned out) reported that commandos had taken the ship, later reporting that it was receiving conflicting reports and was trying to ascertain the facts from their contacts on board the ship. So while non-Twitter sources of information may be slower than the microblogging site, it pays to be wary of the accuracy of the latest tweet.