A regional daily has set up a live Twitter feed to report on the assassination of American president John F. Kennedy’s assassination – 50 years on.
The South Wales Evening Post is marking today’s anniversary of the historic event by posting real-time tweets under the Twitter account @JimLehrer2 – the name of a Dallas Times-Herald reporter who covered it at the time.
The Twitter account is embedded in a story on the newspaper’s website and will bring readers the events as they happened, as if they were happening now.
South Wales Evening Post website editor Paul Turner said: “Our aim is to show in modern terms the kind of thought processes that they would have gone through trying to relay the events of this historic tragedy to the public.”
Reporters are posting real-time tweets to mark JFK's death
John F. Kennedy was assassinated by sniper Lee Harvey Oswald on 22 November 1963 in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, although a host of conspiracy theories about the death continue to abound.
Today’s Tweets will record the events as they happened in US time at the equivalent UK time, so if an event happened at 10am in the US, the newspaper will tweet it at 10am UK time.
To view the live twitter feed click here.
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What a waste of time and resource. Think I’d rather have some solid local news to read instead.
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Interesting. I had no idea that JFK was from South Wales. Or was it Oswald?
In all seriousness – this newspaper industry obsession with twitter has got to stop! Why promote your competitor?
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Sorry, this is one of the naffest uses of Twitter I’ve read about so far, dreamed up by someone too in love with tweeting for their own and readers’ good.
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We need this like a hole in the head…
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Great way to illustrate the speed of digitally supplied news.
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Anything which engages the readership has to be a good thing and it is likely JFK’s assassination will still resonate with many of the Post’s readers.
A tweet is a contemporary twist on reporting an historical event but surely the ‘where I was when I heard the news’ element will be lost if the events are tweeted ‘live’ but without the time difference between the US and UK?
‘Today’s Tweets will record the events as they happened in US time at the equivalent UK time, so if an event happened at 10am in the US, the newspaper will tweet it at 10am UK time.’
Twitter is criticised for many things but it is a near-immediate information channel.
Also I cannot help but regard the line about conspiracy theories around the assassination, as worrying. In a Wikipedia world too many journalists just regurgitate what they have just lifted from the net.
When we report the Holocaust or, say the deaths of Neil Armstrong or Princess Diana, are we now obliged to include that alternative theories about historic events are also available?
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Really? Is this not getting to be a bit of a silly gimmick that’s as tired as it is pointless?
I doubt Jim Leher would agree that today’s social media was quite in the same class as the 1963 Dallas Times-Herald.
Come on people. There’s journalism to be done out there. Let’s do it, eh?
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What the?
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Dear moaners
This is called engaging with the readers. Generally A GOOD THING.
Ends
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This is worthwhile if it generates revenue for digital accounts and can be provided by reader supply sources – who cares whether it is of interest to anyone; if it costs nothing, it’s a commendable idea
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All for engaging with readers but are the good people of south Wales REALLY going to get excited about this? Especially your average Twitter user, most of whom I suspect will be too young to remember and have much better things to be interested in- much like the rest of us!
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Strange idea, badly done.
For a start they need to check their spelling on the homepage links, ssss, surely.
And there’s nothing on the Twitter account to suggest they’ve borrowed Jim Lehrer’s identity. If you didn’t know better, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was really him on behalf of the Times Herald in Dallas, not somebody 4,500 miles away in Swansea, ancestral home of the Kennedys.
Oh, sorry. They were Irish.
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That’s the trouble with newspapers and technology.
Just because you CAN do something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.
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I think this is an interesting experiment which is proving more compelling than I initially thought – the Twitter feed conveys the words of a man who was there at the time and (in my view anyway) packs an emotional punch.
I can see where critics of this experiment are coming from, but surely the SWEP deserve credit for thinking outside the box? They are, after all, trying something different.
What I don’t understand is how Jim Lehrer’s comments were relayed on that fateful day. I doubt they were ‘snaps’ put out over the wires…
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In 50 years time people will be able to say exactly where they were when the SWEP Tweeted Kennedy’s Assassination.
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Okay, it’s 1.15pm and the Twitter account has 24 followers (some of those not useful, such as Hootsuite). There’s no content on the Post website and no links from the Tweets so far driving people to anything useful for the paper/website. If you’re going to do something like this, do it how it would be done in today’s environment as a whole. Did anyone try to get permission to use pictures or video in these Tweets to give it that more up-to-date presentation? All we have here is a historic timeline of events being written on Twitter. There is absolutely no demonstration of how this would unravel in the modern world. Terrible idea!
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I’ll put my money on it barely making the top 500 most read stories on the site today!
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Reporting on the JFK assassination? 50 years too late I’m affraid…
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Damn, I was wrong. A reliable source tells me that it’s currently the 450th most-read with 120 unique visitors so far.
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