During Week 3 we looked at how we can use Twitter to do reporting.
What is reporting? It's researching the facts of a story. While traditionally it involves interviews and digging for documents, the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google can be used to source information.
ZabaSearch, Facebook, law enforcement inmate information sites and other databases can be used to background people as well.
Where do we get photos, video and audio? For photos, I search for Creative Commons images on Flickr and Wikipedia. For video, YouTube is king, but you can also find video (and photos, for that matter) that are perfectly okay to use on Twitter.
We talked about making sure to link to aggregated sources.
Using "block quotes" allows you to break up your copy so that it's not a boring block of words.
On deadline? Learn to type on your computer during phone interviews so you can quickly copy and paste info into your story.
Online interviewing is okay as a last result, but the biggest drawback is that it's hard to ask follow-up questions or pin someone down on a key point.
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