Using Twitter to write a business magazine story

Steve Baker, a former business journalist at BusinessWeek, writes for The Huffington Post about how he used Twitter to write a story for the magazine and how he doesn’t use Twitter any more.

Baker writes, “But then I came up with a plan to leverage my mainstream journalism asset. I would write a BusinessWeek article explaining ‘Why Twitter Matters.’ But instead of calling up the usual sources, like @jayrosen_nyu, @jeffjarvis and @biz (Twitter co-founder Biz Stone), I would research the piece on Twitter. I would tweet topic sentences for each paragraph, and the Twittersphere would respond with examples, links and insights. Hopefully, they’d discuss and argue. Through this process, Twitter would write the story. Word would quickly spread about this story, and people who wanted to participate would follow me. I would catch up to Steve Rubel, or even pass him! I’d be hoisted up in the nugget economy.

“It turned out that organizing a boatload of tweets into a coherent article took a lot of work. But it came together. The article went mildly viral and my Twitter following quintupled, finally topping 1,000. My evil strategy worked. And I even won a minor magazine award for the story. (I’ll note, in passing, that traditional journalism awards carry zero weight in the nugget economy, not unless they’re branding giants, like Pulitzers. If I were still focused on nuggets, I’d trade my dusty old Overseas Press Award for 10,000 Twitter followers in a minute.)

“Months after that triumph, the economy cratered and BusinessWeek spiraled toward death. I left in late 2009, after Bloomberg snapped up the magazine for barely the price of a Superbowl commercial, and I got a book contract to write about IBM’s Jeopardy computer, Watson. Since then, I’ve been doing books. That has removed me from the nugget economy. Much of what I’m doing is vaguely secret, and timed by months, not minutes. For instance, I’m co-writing a healthcare book that Penguin will publish next spring. But they’re not publicizing it, and I guess they have their reasons. So I don’t either. I have a couple of book proposals brewing, also secret. As a result, I don’t generate good targeted nuggets. And my Twitter presence has degenerated into the occasional note about my life, a wine I drank in France, a slideshow from Africa. I’m a scattered Tweeter, virtually lapsed and widely ignored.”

Read more here.