News

PoynterOnline's Julie Moos interviewed Caroline Titus, editor and publisher of The Ferndale Enterprise, about her leap into the Twitterverse on Jan. 9, after the 6.5 quake in Humboldt. Titus recalls how, once she'd made sure her family and a neighbor were OK, she went to town to do the usual reporterly thing of "chronicling the damage and gathering quotes." But then:

After about 45 minutes of gathering, it dawned on me for the first time in my 27 years as a journalist, what do I do now? While I've always done phone interviews with major news outlets from out of the area during floods, earthquakes, wildfires, it wasn't until I called my 20-year-old daughter that I kicked into gear.

She is a managing editor of news for The Stanford Daily (she's a junior at Stanford University) and she quickly instructed me to begin "tweeting." I'll be honest, up until then I thought Twitter was for twits.

She says she had 11 twitter followers before the quake, and 209 after.

There's other good stuff in the interview, such as ... did you know Titus once worked with Rush Limbaugh?