Tweeting from a funeral? Is it OK or is it in bad taste?

When I worked as a reporter, I covered more than my share of funerals. 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.
The funerals were heartbreaking, too. I remember staying way 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 to 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.

Twittering for a news organization during the funeral service of a private citizen is 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 spectators to turn off their cell phones at 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? Can’t the public wait until it’s over?

Or does the intense pressure on media outlets to be “first” in today’s highly competitive information climate mean that funerals are fair game for tweets too?

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.

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