Neat, my name showed up in newsprint this weekend

Okay, so what if it was New Jersey’s esteemed Star-Ledger publication, I was quoted in an article by Kelly Heyboer that ran this past Sunday.

The article was about Twitter, a new social messaging service, where you can send out short little status updates and you can choose whose updates to receive. What was interesting about Kelly’s approach to writing about Twitter, compared to some other typical MSM journalist, was that she didn’t need to try and “add value” by making her own assessment of the service’s value or utility. Instead, she asked the people who regularly use it and amplified our sentiments through quotes.

Initially, when I received Kelly’s request to speak to me about Twitter, I was skeptical and nervous: why would a local newspaper care about something like Twitter? It’s not quite as pedestrian as NASCAR or American Idol, you know? I was afraid of getting asked totally irrelevant questions and then horribly misquoted out of context which seems to happen to bloggers who interact with the MSM. But, perhaps curiousity got the better of me–I wanted to speak to Kelly to find out what she was up to–so I gave her a call. Having finally seen the article today, I have to say: I’m remarkably impressed. She asked a few simple questions and let me do the talking, then she chose two quotes to try and capture some of my ideas. We did go into more depth about Twitter but I’m guessing those bits were too speculative to be of much use at this point in time.

All this praise of her article doesn’t mean I’m going to start using dead treeware newsprint, though. I’m going to stick to reading Kelly’s blog at nj.com and subscribing to her RSS feed. But, I am glad to see that there’s a journo out there that seems to “get it” and that she’s in Jersey. It almost gives me hope. :-)

Tags: New Jersey, Star-Ledger, Kelly Heyboer, Twitter, journalism