If you—as a citizen—have local news to report, how do you get the word out?

The Internet offers multiple ways of telling your friends: e-mail, Facebook, Twitter etc. But how to spread the word farther ... faster?

If it’s local news you’ve got, Xpress now offers an option. Post your news (plus links, photos & video) via Twitter, and include in the text the hashtag #mxnow—and Xpress editors will scrutinize the post for relevance. If it passes muster, we’ll post it on the mountainx.com home page where it will reach a wide audience.

Personally, I’m excited about the new feature because MXnow gives citizens a new way to get published and to get involved in news gathering and reporting. At the same time, it still keeps the professionals in the loop (that’s us at Xpress), while it builds a cooperative/collaborative team with the citizens.

I’m sure we’ll find many other approaches to try and to experiment with. Consider this effort a first effort.

Here’s the place to provide feedback about MXnow, ways to improve it, evolve it, and comment on what you think about it.

Keen!

For those interested in seeing this particular hashtag (along with a graph of its use and other features): see http://www.hashtags.org/tag/mxnow/ .  It’s also fun to search for other tags… like #asheville or #robots

A good e-book (free) explaining how to use Twitter (found via this tweet)

RT @mayhemstudios: RT @adrianosucesso Found a great FREE book about twitter http://budurl.com/3jlp #ebook

Just click on the http link.

The first #mxnow tweet was sent on Jan. 30, although it didn’t have much reach because the Twitter-feed window on mountainx.com wasn’t activated until days later (about Feb. 9).

In the first days that the window-feed was open, only one or two tweets were posted per day. But on Feb. 12, eight tweets went through. On Feb 13, the number of tweets fed was 18. By Feb. 16, the level reached its current amount of 25-35 hashtagged tweets per day.

Some of the topics covered include, thus far: the Asheville Twestival, breast-feeding imbroglio at Denny’s, the Faces of Asheville show at the Orange Peel, the WPVM-volunteer controversy, a bad traffic-day with an early morning accident on the Smokey Park Bridge and then a chemical spill on I-240, some late-breaking business openings and band announcements.

The feed contributors have been citizens, journalists, bloggers, media outlets and even unsuspecting tweeple. Perhaps the most interesting tweets occurred as a result of a combination of these. For example, in the case of traffic accident/chemical spill, citizens reported the events; Ashevillelivecam.com transmitted live video, and an Xpress reporter got a statement from officials.

Currently, the way the feed works is this: Anyone on Twitter can hashtag a tweet with #mxnow, which causes the message to come to the attention of a handful of Xpress staffers who act as “gatekeepers.” If they retweet the message, it appears in the Twitter feed on mountainx.com’s home page.

In the coming weeks, we will try enlarging the team of gatekeepers to include nonstaffers, in order to expand the citizen-component of the project and to decentralize the gatekeeper function.

We’re also looking at other ways of organizing and displaying the feed.

To read the entire #mxnow feed from its inception on Jan. 30 through midday Feb 20, click here: http://mountainx.com/media/archive/mxnow.atom

Comments? Feedback?

I’m still very new to Twitter but am finding it a very useful and enjoyable tool.  I can see great potential with the “#mxnow” concept for posting to Mtn Xpress on the run.
I cant’ wait to see what other new and creative uses of Mountain Xpress makes of the rapidly expanding world of Social Media.

Here’s how I aggregate twitter messages for reading at y leisure.
Google Reader is a tool I use for consoldating news of interest into a single access point.  I send all my incoming Tweets (Twitter messages) to Google Reader automatically where I read them at my leisure.  I accomplish this using search.twitter to search for various words (#mxnow, asheville, Black Mountain, etc).  Search.twitter allows me to create an RSS news feed from the search results, which I then subscribe to from my Google Reader account.
End Result….I have a single access point for reading Twitter messages along with other news feeds (such as Avl Cit TImes, Mtn Xpress, Ashevegas, BlogAsheville, etc)  I subscribe to.  From Google Reader, I can easily share messages of interest with others, add my own notes, email news articles, etc.

so everyone -
what do we think of citizen journalists tweets so far?

I think it’s a great concept.

I think it will take a while for the concept to spread and for more folks to realize the potential and beginning sending their own tweets.

I think one of the keys is to continue to have a “gatekeeper” to make sure tweets are newsworthy as opposed to opinions…this seems to be working well thus far.

I can see expansion to other specialized tweets….and associated hashtags.

example….
#mxconcerts for live micro-blogging mini-reviews from local concerts would be a great feature….possibly with concert twitpics

#mxflicks for micro-reviews of local movies

i dont twitter.

i would use ‘pooter’ if it existed, though.

dontalley - 01 March 2009 11:28 AM

I think it will take a while for the concept to spread and for more folks to realize the potential and beginning sending their own tweets.

True. But the adoption rate is pretty impressive, now with just four weeks under the collective belts.

I think one of the keys is to continue to have a “gatekeeper” to make sure tweets are newsworthy as opposed to opinions…this seems to be working well thus far.

Yes, some gatekeeping seems wise. And if people really want the raw feed, it’s publicly available on Twitter at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands;=&phrase;=&ors;=¬s;=&tag=mxnow&lang=all&from;=&to;=&ref;=&near;=&within=15&units=mi&since;=&until;=&source;=&rpp=10
But the whole thing is such an experiment, it’s impossible to know where the explosion is billowing out to, and into what patterns.

I can see expansion to other specialized tweets….and associated hashtags.
example….
#mxconcerts for live micro-blogging mini-reviews from local concerts would be a great feature….possibly with concert twitpics

#mxflicks for micro-reviews of local movies

I totally agree! Multiple hashtags to organize the tweets. It’s in the works.

Heck, maybe even a pooter tag for The PFKaP.

One of the side benefits of the 140 character limit of Twittter is that it forces conciseness and careful choice of words. 

Citizen-journalists learn to get to the core of the matter without rambling (a good lesson for myself).

Twitter is not a strategy

z

Twitter is not journalism

DH

Twitter is a stupid name.

But a great tool for journalism.

I think people like to bash it just because the name is dumb, even if it has many useful, relevant applications. Sure, i dont need to know what brittany spears ate for lunch, but i like how it allows regular citizens to post relevant info from public events. And the word-limit seems like a good thing. Journalists are supposed to be concise.

My problem with it is this: I understand the need for putting some journalism and reporting in the hands of the citizen. It helps break the stranglehold that the AP and UPI wire services (which I believe have been the gold standards and “go to” source for new reporting for as long as anyone cares to remember), but so much reforming of journalism has to happen on the other side of the fence also: the gathering of the real time information and asking why and how a day or so later. Real journalism has gone downhill in the name of being the first to break the story. That’s my problem with twitter.

The internet has been in a lot of ways, the revolution we all deserve in the name of citizen journalism, now it’s up to the reporters to hold up their end and actually do a fair amount of digging.

So to put it another way, Twitter is almost redundant. Plus, the nature of the internet leads to it being less about story gathering and more about slap fighting via text messaging (see the WNC GOP twitter story on the main page).

this from a guy who thinks the moon landing was real.