NPR's media strategist has become a leading player in the breaking news business
Andy Carvin insists that the introduction on his Google Plus profile – "I tweet revolutions" – is a joke, but nevertheless that's what he's famous for. Armed with TweetDeck – the power Twitter user's app of choice – and a thoroughly curated group of reliable, enthusiastic and well-informed Twitter users, the social media strategist for US public service radio broadcaster NPR has become known for his mastery of aggregated and verified real-time news through Twitter. And that's no mean feat on a platform still dismissed by many as a gimmick that trivialises information into uselessly short sound bites.
News organisations have become increasingly fascinated by Carvin's experiments as the value of insight, and the expertise required in aggregating and filtering information on social networks, has become more apparent. When Libya's uprising boiled over two weeks ago, Carvin surpassed even his own record by tweeting nearly 1,200 times in 48 hours. But that statistic is misleading, he explains. "If it's a big story that's playing out over a couple of days then those tweets are going to add up. But the number of words actually written is certainly less than you'd get on a live news broadcast."
Revolutions, natural disasters or presidential elections – these are all rich ground for exploring real-time breaking news, with verification a big part of the filtering process. Wherever possible, Carvin starts with someone he knows and has met in person, but if not he'll observe their online activity, and judge whether they have a tendency for exaggeration or are pushing their own agenda too heavily to be reliable. Many, though, do a good job of capturing the action on the ground.
"It's a form of situational awareness, something I noticed in late June when I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo and hundreds of people were injured when the police attacked. I could only tell what was going on immediately in front of me. I could smell it, see it, feel it, hear it, but I didn't know what was truly going on, whereas when I was using social media I felt I had a better sense of what was happening on the ground." Other demonstrators could help identify accents or locations to verify reports, and the volume of reports helped confirm stories of unrest in certain areas.
Though he's careful to clarify that his background is as a writer rather than reporter, the Arab spring allowed Carvin to explore two of his professional passions: social media, and the Middle East. Before joining NPR in 2006, Carvin worked closely with Global Voices, the international grassroots news network, and he was also director of the Digital Divide Network, coordinating an online resource that promoted equal access online. Carvin travelled abroad extensively and made strong connections in Tunisia and Egypt, among other places, maintaining those friendships online. By the Arab spring, Carvin also had four years' experience experimenting with Twitter and other social networks, including gathering information during the 2008 US presidential election.
"The biggest lesson is that you can't take just one lesson from the social media uprising because every country has its own dynamic," says Carvin. "Egypt already had an active social media elite, many of whom were involved in that particular revolution. But in Libya, where few people had access [to the internet] to begin with, people were sceptical when the first stories came out. In Bahrain the entire country is online and very divided over support for the government, so there was a very active mix of conversations that were sometimes very tense and aggressive."
Carvin's approach is to understand the relevant social media tool as intimately as possible, and then work out how to apply it in different situations. And it's not all about Twitter; he also uses YouTube, Flickr or Facebook. "I'm really agnostic – it's a matter of whether the people I want to talk to are on there, about who's using it and what information I can glean from it."
The new kid on the block, Google Plus, might also have its moment in the spotlight during the 2012 presidential election with its appropriate audience of US-based, very vocal users. Carvin has found himself at the centre of a lively discussion on Google Plus over its policy of not allowing user nicknames or anonymity. Google claims conversations are more meaningful when real identities are used, but it's no secret that those interactions are also more commercially valuable when activity can be assigned to real people. That's a key factor in Google's rivalry with Facebook, which is coming to dominate a second generation of web advertising made more lucrative through more accurate targeting.
After working with contacts across the Middle East, Carvin has a different concern. "The reality is that many of my sources would not be alive today if they weren't working under pseudonyms. They are working under difficult circumstances to get information out." Though it's questionable quite how secure these networks are, Carvin says users will leave if they don't feel in control. This year alone, there have been under-reported cases of Google handing European user data to US intelligence agencies, while Twitter, Facebook and Google were all subpoenaed by the US government during the WikiLeaks investigation.
"The reality of any internet service is that it's a service you don't have full control of. These are businesses with their own goals and agendas and interests, and there's no way to avoid that," he says. "But users will go to communities and tools that suit their own needs as well, so we see a lot of dissidents using these tools because they feel they have certain amount of control."
Carvin's conclusions from his in-depth use of Twitter are surprising. Hashtags are only really useful when a news story first breaks on Twitter, when they help identify the closest sources and provide context, but they lose value if they become too heavily used. Rather than a rumour mill, with some skilful "following" Twitter is a self-correcting debunker of false information. And while it's easy for naysayers to dismiss it, Carvin says seemingly inane tweets about breakfast habits are about people reinforcing their relationships with each other. "I talk about the things going on in my life because people can relate to that, and I want to relate to people too so that when we do work together, there's a relationship there."
Carvin's work complements NPR's core reporting, rather than replacing it, but does it represent a new journalistic role? "Ultimately it makes sense for this kind of newsgathering and open source journalism to apply across news desks."
Some have compared his role to that of a Twitter DJ. "I receive information from all sorts of people, try to keep up with it and mix those beats in a way that's useful to people. You can't necessarily dance to it, but hopefully you can learn from it."
CV
Age 40
Education Northwestern University, Illinois (BS, communications studies, master's in telecommunications science)
Career 1994 new media programme officer, Corporation for Public Broadcasting 1999 manages and promotes Digital Divide Network at Washington's Benton Foundation 2004 programme director, EDC Centre for Media and Community in Massachusetts 2006 senior strategist, NPR
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/04/andy-carvin-tweets-revolutions
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