Electric Fishwrap

Ron Sylvester has a great analysis of his Twitter experiment on Technolo-J. I must admit I was one of those people hitting refresh as much as time allowed. At times watching the tweets roll in was addictive.

One day, I cut and pasted all my “tweet” updates into a traditional story file. It measured 80 inches. Now, I don’t think anyone would have read an 80-inch story from the newspaper on this trial, as compelling as it was. My editors certainly wouldn’t have run a story that long. But what I found is that people will read an 80-inch story, given to them a paragraph at a time, 140 characters long.

Man, I’m cringing about a 30-inch story I am writing for Monday, yet people were glued to his tweets (when Twitter was up in any case). And he didn’t just sit there and tweet all day. He also did multimedia presentations for the Web site the next day:

Between the text descriptions from the courtroom over Twitter, and the multimedia, we were able to give people a feeling of being there that I had never before been able to do in my career. This trial had a “press room” in the law library of an adjoining courtroom.

Watching Ron tweet inspired me as well. I started tweeting on April 30, back when he posted about Twitterlocal. Right then, I decided to try Twitter and see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been sorta tweeting about school board meetings as they happen on Twitter. My newsroom has a Macbook with a Verizon Internet card, which is awesome for researching past stories, file during meetings and saving a ton of time because I have my notes typed out. (Ever want to hit ctrl + F to search your paper notes? But I digress.)

I should also mention Ron Sylvester is running for president-elect of SPJ national.

First off, I am very relieved that my former colleagues at the Loveland Reporter-Herald in Colorado are safe. A half-mile-wide wedge tornado bore down on the town of Windsor, Colo. Thursday morning and carved a wide swath of damage. Only one person was killed and it’s a miracle more were not taken. I believe this is a testament to the strength of our early warning systems and to the construction quality of our buildings.

Stormtrack storm chasers (here and here) had been watching the supercell (posts include technical jargon, also with great pics of radar with the hook echo visible), which had a rare northwest track, since it formed. It put on quite a show, gouging a path through Windsor and then headed toward Fort Collins.

Loveland was also under tornado warning for some time, and staff at the Reporter-Herald huddled in the downstairs hallway for about 15-20 minutes. (Guys, I hate to say it, but if that tornado was anything above an EF-3 that hallway isn’t going to cut it.)

—EDIT: Adding info from Jeff Masters’ Wunderblog. Masters says the damage appeared to be at least EF-3. Check out the great pictures and explanations of the hook echo on his site (animation of reflectivity here).—

Based on the damage from aerial shots from the Rocky Mountain News, Windsor has a long road to recovery ahead of them.

Some incredible video from KUSA is posted on the CNN site. Halfway through the video you can see egg-sized hail pelting the reporter, who is on an overpass of US 34 west of Greeley (I think?). Check out the other videos on that page as well. Just watching the video gives me chills and makes me thankful that Loveland didn’t sustain a direct hit from this monster.

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Last year Ron Sylvester blogged for his newspaper’s Web site for the murder of a small-town sheriff (EDIT: Added link). I read along as the trial unfolded, and it was incredibly riveting. But sometimes it took a while for blog posts to appear on the Web site due to editing resources.

This time, Sylvester is covering another murder trial. The copy desk said “no more.”

People are going on vacation. We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

Like any journalist with a passion, he thought around the problem. He started posting updates on Twitter. Usually his paper doesn’t cover jury selection, but this time they did. It was a capital murder trial. He wanted to know who was going to be on the jury.

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