One of the first posts I ever wrote for this blog was about Facebook (Is Facebook the enemy?). Immediately after that, Ralph Braseth responded with a display of how useful Facebook could be in practical journalistic terms.
Tonight, Meranda Watley goes into more detail - If you’re not on Facebook, you should be - including an explanation of how Facebook is acting as a crowdsourcing hotspot in the hunt for a missing Purdue student:
When I first noticed it, the group had fewer than 1,000 members. By about 7 p.m. that night it had shot up to 1,200. I sent a note to my editors saying this was something I’d never seen before and worth checking into for sources, tips, etc. Currently, the group hovers around 6,000 members. All for one missing student.
Those 6,000 members have been actively posting everything from photos taken the night he disappeared, to missing person fliers to hang up and hand out, to the latest news and speculation. Students that first weekend even organized a huge group to travel from his hometown to the university to hold a prayer vigil and mass search. The university’s police and spokeswoman have even joined in, mining the group for tips, ideas and volunteers. Today, we ran a story about how Facebook has helped in the search.
This would be a good time to revisit another post I wrote a while back about setting up a campus blog beat. Doesn’t take a lot of effort, and it can yield huge dividends in story depth, community relations, and source material.
And check out Watley’s post for further details about using Facebook in the newsroom.
on Feb 6th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
I use facebook like the worlds biggest directory