Trafigura, Tweets & Teaching

I started my professional life as a radio news journalist – with skills honed inside the walls of the Media 140 conference venue - the ABC Centre in Sydney. I was taught that Accuracy, Brevity & Clarity were the A, B & C of good news writing. Twitter is a perfect platform for testing those principles of good practice.

Twitter is one of the new tools I now use in my journalism classes at the University of Canberra to teach my students that pithiness can pack real punch. In September 2008, I took them on a political reporting exercise using the platform: they tweeted the ACT election & some of the journalists in the tally-room came to see what they were up to…most had never heard of Twitter. In the past year, though, it’s made headlines around the world – first in Mumbai…then through reporting of the Hudson River plane crash. In Australia, the ABC led the way with coverage of the Victoria bushfires.

There’s also been the opening up of the Australian houses of parliament to live reporting, with journalists now interactively tweeting Question Time – a reporting practice which is attracting new audiences to the discourses of Australian democracy – headlined by the uber-witty Sydney Morning Herald writer (and newly appointed chief online correspondent for ABC) Annabel Crabb.

And then there’s the iinet trial before the Federal Court. In early May, I tweeted:

“What's the difference between a journo Tweeting or live blogging a court case & a reporter txt messaging a judgement from the courtroom?”

Last month, the Federal Court overturned a decades'-long bar on reporting from within a court-room & accommodated Twitter, afterwards acknowledging its potential value. Meantime, The Australian barred one of the pioneering Journo-Twits, Andrew Colley, from live-tweeting the case while they assessed the legal & business implications. How very myopic & unadventurous.

Of course, Twitter isn’t journalistic utopia…there are a number of significant challenges. In the course of my research, I’ve identified the potential conflict between the personal and the professional created by a medium that encourages private reflections in a public space. As much as many journalists – including me – struggle with this perceived conflict, I’ve concluded that the humanising effect of removing the professional mask and revealing aspects of personality and private experiences is valuable. It’s also valued by online audiences where authentic voices are highly rated. And through this process, journalists are forging online relationships with media consumers, creating individual brands that draw new audiences to their work.

The biggest test for journalism & Twitter to date came during the Iran Uprising where Citizen-Journalism, crowd-sourcing and the speed imperative combined in the absence of a professional media presence to produce a seismic shift in reporting practice… publish first & check the facts later. Content from protesters & observers on the ground was published ahead of verification …on the websites of some of the world’s most reputable mastheads, including the New York Times. It was a watershed foreign reporting moment which highlights the challenges posed by Twitter and other real-time medium to the essential journalistic values of truth and accuracy. While embracing exciting new publication platforms & information-oriented communities, we need to remember that accuracy & verification are the antidotes to an overdose on speed (A panel & discussion on the implications of Iran for Social Media Journalism was held during the conference, featuring ABC's PM presenter, Mark Colvin & Al Jazeera's Head of Social Media, Riyaad Minty. View it here)

But if there’s one case study globally that proves the value of Twitter to journalists and journalism it’s Trafigura: a tale worthy of John Grisham.

As Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s Editor put it: “A mix of old media and the Twittersphere blew away conventional efforts to buy silence”

The story revolved around an attempted cover-up by the Trafigura trading company which was the subject of a mass litigation for injury to 30,000 citizens of Ivory Coast, following a toxic sludge-dumping incident. At first, the company succeeded in obtaining a gag order on The Guardian to stop it revealing a leaked report associated with the case…but when the company succeeded in obtaining a super-injunction from the British Courts to prevent The Guardian from reporting an MP’s question to parliament about the case - effectively over-turning 300 years of media freedom – Rusbridger saw red…and turned to Twitter, posting this tweet:

"Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?"

Rusbridger wrote of the experience: “By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly's question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.

Many tweeters were just registering support or outrage. Others were beavering away to see if they could find suppressed information on the far reaches of the web. One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable.

By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel…blown away by a newspaper, together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”

As Rusbridger observed in the aftermath:

“Twitter's detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters. My 104 characters did just fine.”

This case demonstrated the capacity for journalists to use Twitter as a massive human search engine – to sift the tonnes of information available online in a collective effort, for the benefit of both excellent journalism & democracy. It also revealed the capacity for Twitter mobs to effect change through the application of tweet-heat – a process by which protesters uttering disgust & dismay, caused a topic to trend as they united through aggregating hashtags.

In the aftermath, the British parliament began debating the implications for free speech and there are suggestions of an overhaul of legislation that enabled the offending judgement. This was not just a victory for Twitter and The Guardian. It was a victory for democracy and media freedom. Activist journalism in the Social Media Age involves mobilising online communities and Twitter is currently the most effective of these.

So, let Trafigura put to rest the notion that Twitter is just a fad, full of narcissistic banality, which can afford to be ignored by newsrooms and individual journalists alike. There is currently real journalistic value in Twitter. And that value is not best extracted by dropping into others’ sites as a non-user, but in creating a journalistic identity for yourself on the platform; by making new connections outside your professional and personal silos; by genuninely engaging with followers – not just using the medium as another broadcast device. Don’t expect to have your followers feeding you exclusives & helping you with research if you’re a selfish tweeter Building genuine relationships with audiences & involving them in journalistic processes will help build interest in the quality journalism you produce & it will help mitigate the widespread distrust of mainstream media.

Twitter is entrenching the new news order: where the top-down model of information delivery presided over by an elite few is being swapped for peer-to-peer delivery on online social networking sites …the story-tellers are among us and they’re setting their own news agenda – at a cracking pace. Professional journalists need to figure out how to be distinctive and trusted information purveyors in these spaces.

Central to navigating this new territory will be responses from employers, Journalism academics, professional organisations like Australia's Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance & employers. While I believe it’s now essential for journalists and media outlets to be involved on Twitter, the industrial implications of an ever-increasing workload on reporters need to be addressed along with the ethical & professional implications.

Updating guidelines & editorial codes in response to the Social Media phenomenon is a good idea. Writing restrictive, anti-free speech codes – like the one the Australian Financial Review recently instituted, which prevents journalists from tweeting professionally - is not. But the AFR isn’t alone in its controlling approach.

The Washington Post also sought to tighten the reins on its reporters and editors, banning all commentary on Twitter that could be construed as opinion. Before he was gagged and issued a public mea culpa, one of the paper’s managing editors, Raju Narisetti, tweeted:

“For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it comes to censoring personal views.”

The constant framing of Social Media & the Future of Journalism debates through dystopian & utopian lenses conjures conflict, rather than progress. It’s time to move on & make the news…new.

Is social media the death or salvation of professional journalism? It’s neither – but it IS part of the revolutionary armoury in the struggle to reinvent journalism. And engagement is the heroine of the revolution