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    Categories: Social Media

How The #Newtown Tragedy Unfolded on Twitter via Andy Carvin

Andy Carvin calls himself an “oral historian” and created a new genre of news coverage by blanketing Twitter during the Arab Spring and RT’ing and crowdsourcing the news as it spread on social networks. When the Newtown massacre happened last Friday, Carvin was covering it once again as the news broke, which led to mocking criticism of Carvin by media gadfly Michael Wolff at the Guardian, calling Carvin a “fevered spreader of misinformation.”

But Carvin was really putting each rumor that flew on social media out into the public sphere for discussion and trying to get at the truth. He might not have been there, but he did observe what was going on with a critical eye. Yesterday morning, he was defending himself on the Facebook Social Journalism Group and described his role like this:

I’ve always regarded myself more as an oral historian rather than a journalist. I try to capture the emotion and confusion of a breaking news story, and also challenge my followers to help me figure out what’s true and what’s not. And the only way to do that is to acknowledge the rumors, then work together to research them.

So here is Carvin’s own curated tweets from last Friday as the tragedy unfolded in Newtown, Conn. He gave us permission to embed them here, but wanted to note that he did not include all the @ replies he received from some of his questions, but does include all his RTs and tweets that day.

UPDATE (12/18/12): Due to concerns about obscenities in some of the retweets in Carvin’s Storify, I’ve edited my own compendium of Carvin’s tweets from that day, minus the ones that did not comply with PBS standards. I believe it still holds up, and includes 99% of his tweets and retweets.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian and fiancee Renee. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

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