The Austin American-Statesman has started as a dedicated feed just for stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, and it’s a good move. The paper has recognized the enormity of the story, and by grabbing the Twitter URL quickly, the paper is showing a real dedication to giving people streams of information around topics and not just brands.

Why dedicate a separate feed to one story? Because of the audience. I’m following the Fort Hood story, but I’m not especially interested in the other stories coming from the paper/website. To get information about the story that interests me, I’d like to see the local reporting on the story. It’s a big plus for me to be able to opt-in to this one story. I can’t speak for locals in Austin, but I’ll bet they appreciate being able to break out this one story from the others the paper may cover in a given day.

Poynter’s Craig Kanelley talked with Robert Quigley, the social media editor at the Statesman:

“When we heard (the first news about the shootings), we knew we had to get moving and sent out a breaking news alert,” Quigley said in an interview conducted by phone and e-mail. “Within a few minutes, we had a reporter on the phone with Fort Hood and got confirmation. And we turned it around really fast, setting up the Twitter account.” Statesman Editor Fred Zipp first proposed the idea of creating a separate Twitter account to cover the event, according to Quigley. Quigley said he liked the idea and immediately jumped on it, trying different name combinations on Twitter, including “FortHood,” before deciding on “FtHoodShootings” to fit Twitter’s character limit for an account name.

Smart stuff. The instinct was to Think Social. The updates on Twitter are not all about driving traffic to the main site. Some updates have links, others don’t. As of this writing, the paper had sent out 265 Tweets and had garnered 3,300 followers just of this one stream. That’s huge. The paper’s “master” Twitter feed, twitter.com/statesman, has 15,000 followers. To pick up 3,500 just for the one Fort Hood stream – in the space of a week – is an enormous success.

It so happens that the story broke as Twitter introduced a new feature – Twitter Lists. (See next article.) These allow you to curate lists of your favorite feeds, and your friends can decide if they want to follow your lists. Statesman’s Fort Hood Twitter page made it onto 154 lists. This improves the chances that the page and stream will go viral. That, in turn, helps the Statesman become the authority on the story. This is where we want to be.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 1:48 pm and is filed under MediaReinvent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.