Live tweeting Trump at the NYT

Alexandra Ma, one of my current crop of Interactive Journalism students, looks at how the New York Times live covered its meeting with Trump:

But out of all the ways the Times covered the event, Twitter was by far the most effective.

The Times’ social media strategy editor, Michael Gold, created a public Twitter list of the journalists who had attended so people could follow — and instantly react to — direct quotes from the president-elect.

But that, in itself, brings some problems:

The Times’ journalists mostly tweeted direct quotes from Trump, some of which — such as his suggestion that Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist and former editor of Breitbart News, was neither racist nor alt-right — seemed factually dubious and would be best accompanied with fact checking after the event.

The danger of immediacy is clearly lack of contextualisation – and that needs to be there.