The flood of activity surrounding the turmoil in Iran on Twitter the past few days has got me thinking about ways to make the platform more useful when big news events occur. Much has been said about how this episode is demonstrating the failure of traditional media, as real-time media has now become the main source of breaking information in Iran. There is no doubt that Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the like are now a very important resource, but I think it’s important to recognize what we might lose if we completely throw the CNN model overboard. Important services that traditional TV news outlets provide include: intelligent filtering of the raw data stream, and a format that makes commentary accessible. TV news coverage does these things well, in that there are news directors who prioritize information, and a presentation format that weaves background information and editorial content together in a digestible package. These piece have been notably absent from the ‘coverage’ provided by #IranElection.
Here is an idea that occurred to me, for a specialized blogging platform that would allow anyone with sufficient passion or knowledge of an event to produce their own live news coverage of a story, broadcast it to the web, and take advantage of all these amazing real-time media tools. Imagine a website, let’s call it Anckr.com, that you could go to when a story breaks. If you wanted to provide real-time news and analysis of the story, you could log in via Oauth with your Twitter credentials. You would then be presented with an administrative interface where you could set variables like: The Headline of the story, a friendly looking URL and a hashtag for your news coverage.
You would then have the opportunity to tweet directly from this interface with commentary on the event. In addition to your regular Twitter feed, your tweets would show up on the public facing news page that you’ve generated (pictured below in section ‘A’). In this respect, you would be serving as a news anchor for the story. As anchor you would have the opportunity to populate your news page with real-time content from many different sources. For example, any relevant photos or videos could be embedded into section ‘E’. You could also display relevant news feeds from traditional news outlets there (if they are bothering to provide coverage at all). This section could also provide space to display a feed of viewer beedback, that could be populated by tweets from viewers who have tagged their posts with the hashtag for your coverage.
If you wanted to provide more compelling updates, there could be a section of the page that allows you to display a live video or audio stream of yourself (section ‘D’) providing commentary. Relevant hashtags could be displayed easily (section ‘B’), providing links to more conversations about the event.
Most importantly, there would be a section where you could provided a moderated feed of miro-blogging content (section ‘C’). The Anckr interface would allow you to follow individual tweeple who you believe are valuable sources. For example, you could have a feed for ‘witnesses’ of the event, people tweeting from the scene. Or, you could have a feed comprised of knowledgeable commentators.
Now, I could imagine traditional news organizations using a branded version of this sort of interface. Alternatively, anyone who chose to start a page, could become their own ‘reporter’. Since no one can provide 24 hour analysis by themselves, it would be cool if there was a mechanism that allowed you as the anchor, to hand off control to someone else of your choosing, kind of like how BNO news does now on Twitter.
All of the tools for creating such a website exist. I’ve listed some of the resources above, including: Twitter, FriendFeed, UStream, YouTube, Flickr, TweetCloud and Paratweet. Thesea re just some examples, but I’m sure there are many others.
The closest thing that I’ve found is almost.at, which is very cool, but more of an automated filtering service. If you are aware of anything like what I’ve described above, please let me know. If I had any free time, I might build this myself. Since I don’t, I hope someone gives it a try.
