Twitter -- Tweeting 101

Like the rest of multimedia, you may not immediately link Twitter to journalism, but once you deconstruct it and look at it, it starts to make sense.

This is the most basic value of Twitter -- it's another way to relay events live and as they happen to an audience who may not be near a TV or radio or whatever. You can essentially "broadcast" live, just using text sent to mobile devices and readers. And you do it 140 characters at a time.

What you try to do is capture telling thoughts, moments and facts, in some sort of sequential order. Think about what you notice that stands out. Think about an anecdote or detail that you would share with a friend, if a friend was standing right next to you. Think about the play-by-play of something unfolding in front of you. Think about summations. Those are all potential tweets.

Ideally, the best tweet streams can be put in reverse order and read just like an inverted-pyramid news story, with (timewise) your first tweet summing up what happened, and the following tweets filling in details and offering a chronology as something unfolds.

Here -- again, in reverse order, with the tweets in order of when they were posted -- is the State News' sports Tweet stream just before and from the press conference announcing Coach Dantonio's heart attack in 2010:

Report: Football head coach Mark Dantonio suffered a heart attack but is OK.

There is a "important football-related press conference" scheduled for 1 p.m. It is unclear if it is related to reports of Dantonio's health

MSU: Dantonio will remain at the hospital for a few days for monitoring. Return to sidelines at a later date.

MSU: Offensive coordinator Don Treadwell will manage day-to-day responsibilities of head coach.

MSU: Dantonio had "symptoms consistent with a heart attack."

MSU: Dantonio had a cardiac catheterization procedure early Sunday morning.

AD Mark Hollis said Dantonio will not be on the sidelines for the Northern Colorado game Saturday.

Hollis: "This is a time for the Spartan nation to come together, to rally."

Dr. D'Haem of Sparrow Hospital said a full recover is expected.

Dr. D'Haem said procedure is very routine and happens often. Also said he expects no long-term negative impact. Return yet to be determined.

Dr. D'Haem said Dantonio began feeling symptoms around 12:30 a.m. Sunday.

Dr. D'Haem: Heart attacks are never good...but I would classify this as a rather small heart attack.

Hollis said he spent the night at the hospital until about 5:30, the returned to hospital this morning at 8.

Dr. D'Haem: "Stress doesn't cause coronary heart disease, but very stressful events can be a trigger."

Coach Treadwell on players' reaction: "They're handling it as well as they can. They love their head coach."

Hollis: "(Dantonio's) thoughts went immediately to his family and then to the football program."

Treadwell said the fact staff has been together for a number of years will make this process easier from a football point of view.

Dr. D'Haem said timetable for Dantonio's return will be taken week-by-week.

There's a lede. There's a nut graf. There's supporting details. There are quotes. There is background. It collectively qualifies as a journalistic story. And you did it within the confines of social media.

This is exactly how The Associated Press wire service has always filed breaking news stories as a story is breaking: line-by-line, with the idea the lines can be pasted together into a story. It allows the writer to push out a story (and an editor to edit copy) much faster than if he or she waited to have a mass of information combined into a story, and yet a reader still ends up with all the information they need to consider the package in its totality.

So really, tweets are just a way of applying old journalistic skills in a new way.

Now, in this class I am going to demand a minimum of 12 tweets per assignment. But if you go waaaay beyond 12 tweets, that's okay! If there's something going on that calls for constant updates, then tweet away until you feel the story is adequately told.

You can also supplement your tweets with links to a photo uploading site, like yFrog, which can help tell the story beyond the 140 characters allowed in a tweet, and beyond simple words.

Plus, you can also link to anything on the Web with the aid of a URL shortener, like bit.ly. What the service does is take a URL and replace it with a much shorter one. Using a bit.ly link here gives you more room to write text without the URL taking up so much space.

Also, as part of your assignments here I will ask that any tweet stream be accompanied by hash tags. A hash tag is a phrase led by the hash tag symbol of #. On Twitter, that allows someone to search by hash tag, which will reveal any and all tweets from anyone that includes that hash tag.

Let's say on the aforementioned Dantonio tweet stream you had hash tags. And let's say the hash tag was #sickcoach. Incorporated hash tags would look something like this:

Report: Football head coach Mark Dantonio suffered a heart attack but is OK. #sickcoach

There is a "important football-related press conference" scheduled for 1 p.m. It is unclear if it is related to reports of Dantonio's health #sickcoach

MSU: Dantonio will remain at the hospital for a few days for monitoring. Return to sidelines at a later date. #sickcoach

And that's it. Easy, right?