Would You Use Google Wave to Foster Discussion of News?
Journalism 2.0 has a new guest post by Hilary Fosdal entitled "Using a public Wave to engage a news audience." The post highlights how the Chicago Tribune's RedEye publication is using Google Wave to connect with readers by creating a new public wave to discuss a different news item each day. In essence, the Chicago Tribune has found a valuable way to foster discussion of news items in real-time with a targeted audience. The RedEye's public waves have a regular schedule (10:30 a.m. CST) and they have a thirty minute duration. However, the public waves don't exist in a vacuum. The news item or issue planned for discussion is announced on other major social media sites such as Twitter to encourage participation.
With each Daily Wave, RedEye connects with their readers and builds a sense of community. The RedEye is also demonstrating that is sees itself as more than a newspaper and more than a blog by embracing innovative technology that encourages a continuous and dynamic discussion about the news.The post goes on to discuss how Robert Quigley, social media editor of the Austin American-Statesman, also uses public waves to engage with readers. Of course, discussing news items is one thing, but actually reporting news as it is occurring is another thing. And I think that is where we will potentially see an explosion of "live-waving" for a variety of events, not only news. Thus far Twitter has served as an invaluable tool for gathering real-time, albeit disjointed, information for a particular news item or event. The use of hash tags has effectively emerged as a way for classification and easier (though not easy) finding of relevant content. As Google Wave continues to gain momentum and users, we could see traditional and emerging media channels using Google Wave to report, correct, update, and distribute information to a broad (yet targeted) audience in real-time. Imagine searching for public waves, rather than tweets, that lead to active and open discussion about a particular news item? You could "follow" waves of interest or engage directly by replying and adding to one or more conversation threads. Cool stuff.
