I would never have believed it! Famous novelists tweeting books? These articles about trends in the Twitterverse were fascinating and gave me a whole bunch of nutty ideas for micro-stories that could be carried on the wings of the corporate media giant’s tiny blue bird.
Also — a deep look into the fast-changing media job field and how journalists can train for jobs that don’t exist yet.
Tweets by @RL_Stine
'How to Do Social Journalism and Overcome ‘Platform Anxiety’ by Sam Berkhead at Media Shift led me to hours of further reading.
A common misconception among reporters is that it’s impossible to tell a complete news story through social media. While Twitter’s 140-character limit might seem like an impractical constraint, there have been several journalists who have shown that it’s possible for narratives to flourish in this format.One example of this is Jonathan O’Connell’s story about Washington, D.C.’s X2 Metro Bus line for The Washington Post earlier this year. The story used 24 tweets from bus passengers to weave a narrative that “just painted a beautiful portrait of the city and its people,” said Wright Bryan of NPR’s social media desk.
In The Hottest Self-Publishing Platform? Twitter!, Joe Sutton for IndieReader makes a few deeper points.
Twitter fiction isn't just about serialization, though. Perhaps you've heard of Hemingway's famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Readers and writers have challenged themselves and each other to construct stories within the constraint, and Twitter's 140-character limit is perfect for producing tweetable, shareable stories of similar brevity. The Guardian has an archive of ultra-short, one-tweet-long stories by notable writers--though unfortunately it hasn't been updated since 2013. But it stands to show how Twitter can be used to share uniquely short pieces, or simply be used as a fun writing exercise prompt for authors. You can find other such pieces by lesser-known writers collected by Nanoism.
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