Tweeting from a funeral?
October 27, 2009
Tweeting from a funeral? Is it OK? Or is it bad taste?
When I worked as a reporter, I covered a number of funerals for young people.
One was for a 7-year-old who had his head cut off with a box cutter after a home invasion.
Another was for a family of two young sisters and their grandmother who all died in a fire while the mother/daughter was in prison on drug charges. The mother recieved special dispensation from Gov. Rowland to attend the funeral.
Both were high profile stories that appeared on the front page of the newspaper. Both were heartbreaking.
And the funerals were heartbreaking. I will never forget them. I remember staying in the back, watching scenes play themselves out, and taking notes as discreetly as possible with my pen and my notebook.
Would punching out my notes on my mobile phone in 140-character sentences and sending them out the public live on my Twitter feed during the service be essentially the same thing in this day and age?
I don’t know.
I remember taking the time after both of these funerals to be very thoughful and respectful with the words and information I delivered to the public in my story.
Maybe that’s my problem: Can you be thoughtful and meaningful on Twitter?
Maybe you can. But such immediacy leaves lots of room for thoughtlessness, too.
Or maybe because of those experiences, I’m just too sensitive when it comes to this subject.
I think twittering for a news organization during the funeral service of a private citizen is in poor taste. Not necessarily unethical, but it feels disrespectful. Aren’t the deceased and their grieving family entitled to the full attention of everyone attending funeral services, including the press?
Even the PGA forces people to turn off their cell phones when they attend golf tournaments. If you are constantly connected and communicating, you are only giving partial attention to the event at hand.
Has the public’s appetite for information become so insatiable that we’ve come to require play-by-play commentary during funeral services? Why can’t we wait until it’s over?
Writing short, well
February 10, 2009
Writing for the web demands writing short. You are crafting content for an audience with a very limited attention span. And most people don’t read online. They scan.
So here are 25 tips for writing short by Roy Peter Clarke, the writing coach at Poynter Institute.
My short list of Clarke’s best tips:
- #6. Beware: The infinite space on the Internet creates aerated prose.
- #7. The shorter the passage, the greater the value of each word.
- #12. Imagine a short piece from the get-go. Conceive a sonnet, not an epic.
- #17. Read, study, and collect great examples of short writing, everything from the diaries of Samuel Pepys to the Tweets of your favorite Twits.
- #18. The best place for an important word in a short passage is at the END.
- #22. Obey Mark Twain: You may need more time, not less, to write something good and short.
- #25. Treat all short forms of journalism – headline, caption, blurb, blog post – as literary genres.
