Reporting live on Twitter
Covering an event live was more difficult than what we previously anticipated. It should be a well thought of process and requires a lot of preparation. Prior to this exercise we thought live coverage was more spontaneous, yet obviously we were wrong. First to find an event that seemed relevant was difficult. Yet thanks to the festival NEXT, we were able to find one more easily. The event we covered was a talk show with a social media influencer in LAU, Abu Hashem, aka thedailyquestion. The talk show topic was a very interesting one which pushed us to cover it even more; it was about politics and sectarianism in universities. A Politian, Misbah Ahdab, was the guest of the show so it was pretty easy to find his twitter handle, yet Abu Hashem did not seem to have a twitter. For hashtags, the most logical one was the festivalNEXT2019, then for the others, we tried creating them. The audience we tried to reach were students in Lebanese universities, specifically LAU students. For consent, we did not need to ask for permission since the event we covered was widely mediatized, specifically that it was within the framework of festival NEXT and was organized by LAU communications department. Our research on the event mainly was through some of the organizers. We contacted some organizers of the event in order to learn more about it, and we tried finding other information by searching about the guest. Our work plan was not very effective since we had time constraints, yet we met a day before in order to talk more about how we were going to cover the event. Since the event was not structured and we did not know what was going to be talked about in specifics since it was a political debate and we did not know what the student representatives of parties that spoke were going to say. Also, there weren’t any structured questions and direction to the event and was more of a conversation and debate between students and Misbah Ahdab. The roles were divided in a way that made it easier for us to cover this event, we decided to have someone taking pictures and videos, another person to tweet and the third person to also take note of what is going on and compose tweets while the person who is tweeting is writing it, and we switched between the roles.
In our live twitter report, we did include the basics; the 5W and the H, the structure though is not very comprehensible. Yet that is mostly because the debate itself was not structured and was very difficult to tweet about. The topic, even if it was stated, was not really followed during the event. As any political debate, it derailed completely and the topic became very blurred, and that is reflected in our live reporting. To us, we did not completely reflect what happened on the site, yet we were not far from it at all. This is shown specifically in the last tweet where we stated that the topic was not tackled properly. The story we constructed was a collection of what was said in the event, which was not structured, yet we wrote about most of what happened. One thing that was difficult to do was wording the tweets, since the debate was in Arabic and we needed to quickly translate what was being said, and that diminished the quality of our tweets as well. What is missing are more tweets that require our audience to engage, and more visually pleasing images and videos. We also needed to include more concise videos that are straight to the point, yet we did not know where to cut them exactly since what was being said was important. For next time we would include visuals that are more appealing and more straight to the point. And we should’ve prepared visuals prior to the event. For quotes, we posted what the student representatives were saying clearly, and for the politician, we tried to post the most relevant things he said. Yet there are some things that we were more scared to tweet since in our country, we could be attacked for stating certain things. One experience that we went through was the fact that we were sometimes scared of posting certain things that the politician was saying since we thought maybe we misunderstood or maybe we would write something that would be wrong. We did not receive much audience engagements. People did see our tweets but not many reacted to them. Our engagement strategy obviously did not work out. Next time we do such a thing, we should be more prepared for the coverage and should do much more research. Also, for next time we should be more confident about what we were tweeting because our tweets lacked confidence. All in all, we would give ourselves the grade of 11/15, our coverage was not great, yet the event did not help either.
by Louna Karameh
Ahmad Abdallah
Nadine Daouk
