{"id":10852,"date":"2013-10-27T19:20:34","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T08:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=10852"},"modified":"2019-04-14T00:01:44","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T14:01:44","slug":"experiment-twinterview-christoppsydney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/experiment-twinterview-christoppsydney\/","title":{"rendered":"My experiment with a Twinterview, by @ChrisToppSydney"},"content":{"rendered":"[clear]\n
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ASAC Team<\/p><\/div>\n

By Chris Topp<\/a><\/p>\n

27 October, 2013<\/p>\n

On Saturday, October 19 I picked up a postcard promo at my local caffeine dealer and had a little idea. Five minutes later I was home and emailing The Launch Group, the PR company dealing with this year’s Blue Knot Day\u00a0 launch<\/a> on Monday October 28.<\/p>\n

I suggested I do a live interview via Twitter with someone connected to the Adults Surviving Child Abuse event. The ‘live interview’ evolved to Twinterview, an interview conducted over Twitter. Here’s a link to the Storify<\/a><\/p>\n

The saw the interview as a different way of collecting and presenting stories, and as a new experience as a journalist. Practically, I hope it helps me find a job.<\/p>\n

The Launch Group reps loved the idea, and at 2.30pm on Wednesday, October 23 I was interviewing ASCA’s Dr Cathy Kezelman on Twitter. She was on the @BlueKnotDay account and I was on @ChrisToppSydney.<\/p>\n

In the lead up to the interview, Dr Kezelman asked for an outline of possible questions as she was unfamiliar with Twitter. I gave her this outline:<\/p>\n

Welcome; use of images with some questions; ASCA? BlueKnotDay? stats; her\u00a0 personal involvement?; Why? When? Questions that arose organically from her replies. Final comments.<\/p>\n

I felt that any reasonable PR could predict most questions for her, so didn’t have any issues with providing this outline. I suggested that an image or Vine of Dr Kezelman doing the interview would be great to add to the Storify I would do. My proposal included writing a ‘traditional’ story based on the inteview, and putting it all on my tumblr for anyone who wanted to grab it. Vanity meant that a Vine I filmed of myself welcoming Dr Kezelman to the interview did not live to see the light of Twitter.<\/p>\n

Dr Kezelman placed no restrictions on the interview; I proposed limiting it to 45 minutes so people didn’t lose interest, and to keep me on my toes. I spent about 5 hours researching and sourcing images, and then hoped for the best.<\/p>\n

The last time I reported news was in late 2008 from Bangkok for The Australian’s website when Suvarnabhumi International Airport was closed. I wrote stories and provided audio for the website. I was graphics editor for the print edition of the paper at the time, and on holiday in Bangkok.<\/p>\n

Because I’ve worked closely with\u00a0 tabloid editors such as Roy ‘Rocky’ Miller and Jeni ‘Jenster’ O’Dowd (both at The Sunday Telegraph),\u00a0 I’m very aware of the importance of marketing, so I started tweeting, as did @BlueKnotDay. The exercise confirmed to me that digital journalists now need to add marketer to their skillset.<\/p>\n

I phoned the executive producer of a program to see if he’d be interested in a story on the digitality of the interview.<\/p>\n

He was concerned that it would be a “free kick” for Blue Knot Day. I thought: I’ll give you a free kick, mate. Although he did think my suggestion to cover the event on the program’s website might work.<\/p>\n

His reaction, and that of other media outlets, gave me an idea for another project I’ll pursue next week.<\/p>\n

For me, the Blue Knot Day interview was over in a flash. My PC froze (it’s high-tech digital journalism at my place) mid-interview, so I quickly reverted to my iPhone, which I found easier, partly because I wasn’t having to deal with the 3-minute difference between the devices.<\/p>\n

I forgot to put hashtags on a few questions, and I should have made it clear that answers of more than one tweet needed a continued symbol, but overall I was pretty pleased with how it went. It was far removed from a ‘traditional’ print interview, when the reader doesn’t get to see the pauses, poorly worded questions and subeditors’ corrections.<\/p>\n

After the interview, I was deflated, and missed that feeling of being able to interact with colleagues after a significant interview\/job\/event. I was a bit overwhelmed by the tweets that started coming in, so turned my phone off, talked myself out of throwing my unfaithful PC off the balcony, and went for a long swim before I started storifying, writing, and replying to tweets. When I’d written the ‘traditional’ story and uploaded it to tumblr<\/a>, I tweet-marketed it as TWITTER EXCLUSIVE.<\/p>\n

My rebooted PC is now on it’s final warning after it couldn’t quite finish the Storify, meaning I ended up at an EzyMart cafe with internet near the Hyde Park end of Sydney’s Oxford St.<\/p>\n

The dude behind the counter was reading aloud from his Qu’ran, providing an unexpectedly serene end to a challenging day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[clear] By Chris Topp 27 October, 2013 On Saturday, October 19 I picked up a postcard promo at my local caffeine dealer and had a little idea. Five minutes later I was home and emailing The Launch Group, the PR company dealing with this year’s Blue Knot Day\u00a0 launch on Monday October 28. I suggested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,1472,585],"tags":[1473,524,260,2561,2566,451,476],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/blueknotday.jpg?fit=629%2C432&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-2P2","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}