Firefighters tweet about Del City house fire

To keep up with breaking news around the clock, reporters work various shifts at odd hours of the night and morning to make sure NewsOK is up to speed on everything that’s breaking.

Reporter Robert Medley was working the morning shift Tuesday when a fire broke out in a Del City home, causing $200,000 in damage to the structure. The house belonged to sports historian Ray Soldan.

The coverage all began when the fire department notified news outlet of the blaze via email. They were also tweeting about the call at the same time.

The Del City Fire Department (@delcityfire) first tweeted about a structure fire on Howard Drive and provided a photo of the house.  They followed up with more photos and information about additional units responding and streets being blocked off.

It’s important to note that these photos were not attached to the emails, so the only way to see what was going on was to follow them on Twitter.

It just goes to show that the way reporter find and receive information is changing. Agencies are using Twitter to put out information now instead of email. Or they’re posting news releases on Facebook before alerting the media.

When the Del City Fire Department sent out later emails, two of those were tweets that could have been found on the fire department’s page.

I think this is an exciting time for journalism because we can use social media tools like this to our advantage. It also makes it easier for officials to be more transparent with what is happening in their cities.

This is only one example of many other stories that will break on social media. We just have to be equipped and ready to find them.

Photo by Robert Medley

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