NBC News' Ann Curry on Twitter from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, spoke animatedly at the 140 Character Conference in New York last Monday about the importance of news and journalism as a public service rather than a business and the growing impact of social media services like Twitter.
I caught up with her as she was leaving and did a 3-minute video interview before her handlers ushered her away.
“Journalism is an act of faith in the future, and it is a war,” she said. “Oftentimes I feel bloodied with a sword unsheathed. That’s because you’re fighting for stories that you want covered.”
Curry smartly uses Twitter as a sort of electronic newspaper to spread the word about stories that didn’t make it on air. (She tweets almost daily at @AnnCurry.) She points to the fact that many important stories don’t get a lot of attention — in both traditional media and on Twitter. Viewers and users “want to watch something more salacious and that makes me crazy,” and during the panel she bemoaned the items that often receive the most attention on sites like Twitter.
She says of Twitter: “I look at Twitter as my own two-way broadcasting. I put things out, I hear things back, I gain from people’s perspectives all over the world. … I don’t feel threatened [by Twitter and new forms of media], I feel excited.”
Curry is one of the most capable, smart and forward-looking journalists in broadcast news (see her Wikipedia entry), so it’s great news that she has embraced Twitter with such gusto. Here’s the New York Observer’s coverage of her public comments during last week’s conference.
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Related posts:
• Connecting with your community through Twitter
• NPR’s experiments with social media
• Using Twitter at the Chicago Tribune
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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