Herman Cain, former Republican presidential nominee (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Twitter’s rapid-fire capabilities and its character limitations often make for regrettable outbursts and narrow-minded generalities, especially when it comes to race in media and politics. Eric Deggans at Poynter suggests that the medium limits — maybe even distorts — the discussion of such topics, especially when tempers heat up.

In one Tweet, Tim Graham of Newsbusters.org and Media Research Center wrote, “MSNBC touting Karen Finney as another African-American host. Would the average viewer be able to guess that? Or is Boehner a shade more tan?” For Deggans, the comment smacked of an old school notion of diversity in the newsroom and “whether a media outlet will ‘get credit’ for a person of color who doesn’t resemble what some expect black and brown people to look like.”

In another Tweet, the deeply conservative musician Charlie Daniels wrote, “Funny how if you say something against Herman Cain you’re a genius If you say something against Barack Obama you’re a racist.” Deggans’ take was that the comment implies all black politicians are the same, regardless of political record.

The foot-in-mouth virus of Twitter is probably not surprising to many of its users, though. One commenter even responded:

“I understand your frustration at the reactions to your tweets, but that does not explain how Twitter was limited in this circumstance. The only thing I read is that you received a deluge of responses from Mr. Grahams followers. I have often seen this happen in comment sections to stories, so I don’t think it is something unique to twitter.”

(Everyone calls me Lol / Wikimedia Commons)

Poynter covered a South by Southwest panel of media gurus who discussed how social media has affected the way we write and speak. The panelists included Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider; McKinney’s Gail Marie; Digitaria’s Kristina Eastham; and Sean Carton, director for digital communication commerce and culture at the University of Baltimore.

They said that journalistic use of social media actually encourages writers to proofread because they are being read immediately by a large audience who will point out errors. The social media sphere also offers journalists the chance to become the cream of the crop with their writing: with so many people delegating themselves to a wonky shorthand, a well-constructed sentence will catch the smart reader’s eye.

In addition to advancing our lexicon with terms like “friended” and “liked,” social media reminds us that changes in language don’t necessarily reflect degeneration, but more likely a shift we must embrace and try to preempt. It should make us excited that diction and syntax is so malleable.

And online media has taught us to value short storytelling, which can often be more interesting because it forces the writer to fill the post with meaning. “Shorter is better–if you can do it well,” Gail Marie said at the panel. “It takes some level of skill.”

Twitter logo (Jessekoeckhoven/Wikimedia Commons)

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study tracking the best ways to increase one’s Twitter following, according to Poynter. The researchers studied over 500 active Twitter accounts. They found that tweeting negative statements proves to be an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. You’ll also alienate more people if you tweet a lot about yourself and less about “information.” “Informational content attracts followers with an effect that is roughly thirty times higher than the effect of [personal] ‘meformer’ content, which deters growth,” they wrote. “We think this is due to the prevalence of weak ties on Twitter.”

Poynter lists 14 points the study concluded, ruling on what’s good and bad. For example: A detailed profile description or “bio” (good); cramming too many useless hashtags into your tweets (bad).

This isn’t your mom and dad’s Internet anymore. (Credit: LSE Library/Flickr)

Pew released its research on the demographics of social media users for 2012. Jim Romenesko put them together in a pithy breakdown. Two-thirds of adults who use the Internet use Facebook, which was way ahead of all other sites. Sixteen percent are on Twitter, doubled from November 2010. Young people are more likely to use Facebook and Twitter, and women are more likely to use Facebook than men. Pinterest attracts more white people. Instagram has more African-American and Hispanic users than whites. Though Tumblr brings up the rear with only 6 percent of Internet users, it’s much more popular among young people, with 13 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds online signed up.

Credit: Los Angeles Police Department

In the midst of what seems to be the end of the Christopher Dorner manhunt Tuesday evening, San Bernardino County authorities asked reporters to stop tweeting about the showdown between police and Dorner at a cabin outside of Big Bear. The sheriff’s office said the tweets were “hindering officer safety,” after an afternoon where one more police officer was killed and another seriously wounded while tracking down Dorner.

CBS stations complied with the sheriff’s request, alerting their followers they wouldn’t tweet any more updates. Meanwhile, the network’s television stations and sister stations continued to broadcast live feeds of the situation from helicopter view. They even alerted followers to turn on their TVs to watch instead of following the feeds.

(Screenshot: USA Today article / Michael Juliani)

The Twitter app Vine offered journalists (professional and citizen alike) a tool for sharing six-second video clips on their feeds. In early demos, Vine CEOs and eager journalists practiced by showing six seconds of the process of making steak tartare and throwing away their coffee cups. But overwhelmingly, users have taken to Vine to post porn on Twitter, according to USA Today.

Tags like #sex and #porn began appearing on the app, and The Verge reported that one porn clip somehow made it as one of Twitter’s Editor’s Picks. (The clip was removed, labeled as a “human error.”)

ALSO SEE: Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about to get worse

As we know, the tools becoming available for citizen journalism are only expanding. While it seems easy to discount Vine for its early rush of X-rated content, perhaps it’s better to say “So what?” After all, journalism will be journalism, and porn will be porn (except if it becomes an Editor’s Pick).

For its part, Twitter released this statement in response:

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

If you’re about to get shot, do you run or do you take a Vine clip and share it? (Flickr Creative Commons: Nationaal Archief)

Twitter just added a tool called Vine that shares video clips with your followers. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman thinks Vine could be a good reporting tool, suggesting that bystander coverage of spontaneous events will become even more immediate. The tool only lets you share six-second clips, which you can take all at once or stagnate into different scenes.

Vine CEO Dick Costolo, in a demo clip, shared a video of the entire process of making steak tartare, broken up into second-long scenes. The video continues on a loop until you decide to click out of it. Sonderman also thinks Vine might complicate reporting ethics, especially with sharing graphic clips before considering the consequences.  “[A]lso think of how much more traumatic the bystander documentation of the Empire State Building shooting would have been if the photos of dead victims were instead videos, with action and audio,” he wrote.

(Wikimedia Commons)

One of the Huffington Post’s senior editors, Craig Kanalley, has written an article he’s thought about writing a few times before: Are Journalists Joking Too Much On Twitter?  Kanalley is careful to avoid seeming uptight, but he’s troubled by the prevalence of snarky tweets coming from journalists regarding serious news.  He points to some journalists who have been fired for tweets meant to be seen as jokes.  Rather than openly condemning jokey journalists, Kanalley wants a discussion about the interaction of humor with journalism to bloom.

A supposedly real shot of Hurricane Sandy water. (Wikimedia Commons)

Many viral shots of the first 24 hours of Hurricane Sandy turned out to be fake.  Somehow we missed detecting that one right away.  Citizen journalism yields a lot of incredible stuff, but kinks still exist (only human, right?).  According to the Nieman Lab, the human rights organization Witness is creating an app that hopes to make it easier to nab the fake videos, photos, and audio people share from mobile devices.  The InformaCam app “would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.”

It’s like watching an actor psyche himself out before going on stage, or a golfer giving herself a harsh set of the yips when approaching the green. Journalists I’ve met and worked with too often talk themselves out of their natural state and familiar skills when they start thinking about online interactivity. And those fears of failure quickly become self-fulfilling.

Here’s a success story story for you to consider, instead. Not to get all hokey on you, but I do believe that if you’re thinking about success when you interact with your readers, you’re putting yourself in a better place than if you go into conversations with negative thoughts. The key take-away from this success story is that it happened by using good, old-fashioned, print-era, j-school techniques for doing interviews. No special “online” skills required.

Here we go: Last week, I decided to get more active on Twitter by hosting an afternoon “Twitter chat” each weekday. (Okay, I hear people freaking out now. “You said this didn’t require any special online skills, Robert!” Chill. Stay with me.)

I got the idea after stumbling into a couple fun back-and-forth chats with a few of my followers in recent weeks. One time I threw a question out there, and another I responded to someone else’s. In both cases, others joined in with their answers and we had a nice conversation for the better part of an hour.

While I love Twitter as an RSS replacement – a handy way to push headline feeds out to willing readers – the medium’s also a perfect one for this type of focused, real-time conversation. You don’t need a pay for some special chat tool, and the 140-character limit forces everyone to get to a point efficiently.

So I figured, why wait for these moments just to happen? Why not schedule some conversations, and let my readers know when to expect them? The trouble with these types of planned events, of course, is that they too often come across as too planned. It’s like going to a party where the host has overscripted every element of the event. Who wants to be told when the fun starts?

This isn’t some network broadcast interview, where advance work has squeezed all potential for spontaneity from the conversation. Instead of coming to each Twitter chat with a list of canned questions to ask, I kicked it off with a single question, then let the conversation evolve from there.

Listen, then react. Probe. Direct. Test. Challenge.

Ask.

Eventually, something will click. C’mon – we’re all confident when doing an interview with a source. Don’t let a lack of comfort with Twitter or any other online medium rob you of that confidence. Interviewing is interviewing. If you can elicit insight, passion, and emotion from a source offline, you can do it online, too. And those reactions will help your conversation connect with a broader audience.

The interaction never starts right away. I’ve needed at least four tweets to get the conversation going. And more times than not, my original topic dies in just as many tweets after that. So what? Find what makes your interviewees come alive. Then go there. You’ve done this before.

By the third day of my Tweet chats, we trended nationwide in the United States.

Sure, it was silly. A conversation about travel planning mutated into a bunch of gags about theme park attraction names. But it was a perfect diversion for a late Friday afternoon, and the audience was looking for fun, so I helped a few leaders in the conversation steer it there. Yet it wouldn’t have happened if I’d stubbornly restricted the event to a pre-planned script. Or if I’d been too inexperienced with interviewing to pick up on the potential in what looked like a mistake from a reader with only a dozen or so followers. But it was there. And when we followed it, dozens of lurkers jumped in, brought their followers, and we were trending 20 minutes later. (Search for #disneybudgetcuts for the whole thing, if you must.)

Of course, the trend list shouldn’t be every publication’s goal. But better engagement should be. I’ve long said that journalists have the unique set of skills to succeed in social media. Engagement and communication are our business. So don’t let a change in medium psych you out. Try a regularly scheduled Twitter chat with your followers and let your interviewing skills shine. Talk about whatever. Just use it as an excuse to get together with your followers, and talk.