Fr. Jenkins Flies to DC: A Tale of Twitter Tech

Last night's posting on Fr. Jenkins' (alleged) covert trip to DC provides me an occasion to ramble about the contribution of new media to the news cycle, and discuss how it augments AmP's role in Catholic news.

Yesterday at 5:21PM EST I received a tip that Fr. Jenkins was in DC for an unannounced visit with Barack Obama. I was told the report came from a reliable (second-hand) source, and that the news would hit the internet "momentarily."

Since I was away from a computer when I received the message, I used my blackberry to update my twitter account (roughly 5:30PM):

"AmericanPapist is hearing a report that ND pres. fr. jenkins is in Washington DC today to meet with Obama?"

30 seconds later I noticed that AmSpec reporter Joseph Lawler had twittered a support to the Jenkins story, based on publicly-available flight information provided by Flight Aware (I know, it's an amazing world we live in).

Happy to provide more information on the report, and still away from computer access, I re-published Joe's notification:

"AmericanPapist RT @josephlawler confirms fr. jenkins in DC to meet with Obama: http://tinyurl.com/deaydg" [RT= Re-Tweet]

... and that's where I had to leave it for the time being, until I had computer access again.

In the hours that ensued, email after email popped into my inbox asking a) if I had heard the rumor, b) requesting me to post the news, c) wondering if I didn't think the story credible and so was ignoring it on purpose or d) all of the above/"I loved today's PPOTD!".

Later in the evening, safely tucked away at home again, I was finally able to post a recap of the Jenkins rumors ... five hours after the rumor hit the Internet pipelines. And so I thought the story was safely put to bed.

I was wrong.

You see, I forgot to check twitter again. Nestled in among my twitter replies, I found - not only people who were picking up Joe's and AmP's reporting, but a second stream of replies claiming that Notre Dame's spokesman was denying the report that Fr. Jenkins had met with Obama in DC.

Thus I had to go back and revise my original blog post, taking into account this new piece of information.

So why do I bring this all up? I think there's (at least one) important lesson here:

Blogging moves fast, but it doesn't move at the speed of news - Twitter does.

That's why I've been bugging AmP readers to subscribe to my twitter feed. I'm not just trying to play a numbers game and see how fast I can break 1,000 AmP followers - I'm trying to help augment the reporting I provide on the American Papist blog.

Blogging, after all, is an amazing way to provide news and commentary on current events (while at the same time remaining open to comment contributions from the community), but it is only one tool among many - including Twitter - that I use to keep Catholics up to speed on things I believe are important or interesting.

That said, you don't have to join Twitter (for that matter, you don't have to read AmP) because I do try to make sure the blogging stands on its own. It just sometimes has to stand a little behind the front of the news line.