twitter is all THAT and a bag of chips.

So there was this GINORMOUS news story, you may remember it, the Boston Marathon Bombing 4 years ago. I was working as a manager and anchor for a network where all of us anchors were remotely reporting. It was my turn to be on the air when the two brothers decided to split town.

As a startup, we didn’t have street reporters, we didn’t even have stringers. So I reached out to a buddy over Facebook Messenger to say, what in the _____ is going on? And being the amazing team player he was, he offered to help.

The first thing he did, brilliantly I might add, was to check twitter and find all of the local newspapers, TV news crews, local reporters and emergency responders. You don’t have to be a genius to know, you have to source everything and you have to tell the listener exactly where you’re getting your information from, otherwise, #fakenews right? So, of course, we said “so and so is reporting” or “so and so just tweeted” because we weren’t afraid to sound like we were digging way down into the dirt to bring listeners first hand reports.

We worked with twitter and Facebook to get citizen journalist reports and it was a beautiful thing. We beat the competition roundly even though they had street reporters, because we could report in real time exactly what was happening on the ground.

We wouldn’t have been on the air in that fashion – remote anchoring/reporting, 20 years ago, and twitter and Facebook were not a thing back then either. (Thankfully we don’t need razor blades and teensie, tiny editing tape anymore either ;))

The times they are a changin’, and I for one am excited to see what’s next.