CNN Twitter Goes All Out for State of The Union

I always go to CNN for my political coverage, mostly because I think they do the best job of ignoring the 'partisan hackery," to quote Jon Stewart. But I also think their use of social media, especially Twitter, is really cutting-edge.

Not only are all of their anchors on Twitter, but CNN forms and deletes Twitter accounts for every big story, and the State of the Union was no exception. The handle @cnnsotu was managed by John King, and allowed viewers to comment on Obama's speech at will, while receiving sporadic updates on CNN's coverage. But later, King used one of CNN's infamous "magic walls" to break down the Twitter page, analyzing reactions state-by-state. Not only did we see exit-poll-style numbers almost immediately following the speech, but the examples King read showed us how the proposals were interpreted locally and personally across the nation.

I think CNN did a good job of managing and editing their Twitter front for this big event. Viewers were not forced to suffer through hundreds of thousands of mindless tweets, like the YouTube viewers were in their comments section. CNN sifted through and chose an appropriate sample from a geographically and ideologically diverse range of users, and the result was appropriate and painless. In the future, I would have liked to see more blogging on their part, like what they did on their State of the Union ticker, but I think they were focused on making their analytical technology work. And I think what they ended up doing was pretty cool.

And I have to add this as a broadcast major. I noticed that the CNN TV feed got rid of all those annoying titles and charts other text at the bottom of the screen. If I wanted to read and watch at the same time, I knew to go on the internet.