After reading over our page two story "W. Dundee brawl still under investigation" yesterday afternoon before it went to print, I closed my word processing screen and opened up my Internet browser to Twitter. Had any news broken since my last peek at the micro-blog?
To my delight, Courier-News Community News Editor Julia Doyle just had posted a snarky comment: "Trying to get a screenshot of video of a local bar fight that's on YouTube. I wonder if this is what it's like to work on Springer?"
I chuckled after reading the post and immediately clicked "Retweet" so I could broadcast the comment to all of my Twitter friends and followers.
Then, about 20 seconds later, I panicked and hit the "undo" button.
What if other journalists at competitor newspapers read my re-broadcast of Julia's tweet? What if @DHinsider or @MySuburbanLife got wind of our story before it broke in today's paper?
More on how we decide what to tweet -- and when, after the jump.
As professional journalists at The Courier-News, we strive to break news first, getting you information before the competition does. Accuracy and speed are currency in the journalism world.
By re-tweeting Julia's comment, I realized I ran the risk of broadcasting our scoop of a story to the competition before we had a chance to get it to readers.
I spoke with my colleague Emily McFarlan, who posts for you all as @couriernews and on Facebook, about my almost-mistake on Twitter.
Breaking news is one thing. That we want to bring you as quickly as possible. But what about everything else?
We agreed in our modern newsroom -- where the lure of instant publishing and micro-blogging via Twitter, Facebook and other Internet media is so great -- it is sometimes hard to balance your need to tweet and the age-old practice of scooping the competition.
-- Katie Anderson, Staff Writer
Thank you for a great post
Thank you for a great post