The Twest Australian

300 of the Perth Twitterati gathered in the Perth Town Hall on Feb 25th for the Media140 event. It was part of an Around the World in 140 days project initiated by founder Ande Gregson. That’s how he spells it.

Media140 began as a charity fund-raiser when Ande decided he wanted to run a marathon in Africa. Each event is a conference which is streamed live and encourages Twitter communication between speakers, attendees and anyone on the web who is following the Twitter stream. (Explanation of Twitter stream: anyone can tag their Tweet – like an sms sent via phone or web page – with *whatever* and people can then see an aggregation of all those Tweets on a web page in near real time). Creating a Twitter stream is a way of facilitating a Twitter conversation around your event; the Grammys used Twitter to ratings advantage and AdAge write about it here.

At the Perth event the Editor of The West Australian, Brett McCarthy, and his Twitter evangelist and online editor Gareth Parker spoke about the use of Twitter at the paper. They gave the recent example of the fire at Newspaper House, where photos and information were sourced from Twitter users rather than journalists. The journos were still in the car park at Osborne Park when the Twitter users in the city took the photos and reported the facts. Gareth Parker found the reports on Twitter. Ironic that the icon building of news coverage in the state should be an early example of Twitter out-news-gathering traditional journalism. “Out-news-gathering”: I should SO have been a journalist.

McCarthy canvassed producing a Twitter edition of The West Australian. He said the paper could use Twitter and social media as a way of influencing what stories were covered in that edition(s). And he invited the Twitter community to make suggestions on how that might work.

Brett Sandler from Nova had hands-on stories about the station’s use of Twitter while lawyer Andrew Pascoe from Allens, Arthur Robinson charmed the audience; no other way to say it. There were a number of very informative talks about the risks of social media and best practice in the area. Props to Tama Leaver of Curtin, Jared Woods from SKM and Venessa Paech from Lonely Planet. That’s how she spells them.

Photo by Paul Pichugin