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Twittering BFD
By adamg on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 12:10am
UPDATE: The feed is now gone. A Boston firefighter had set it up after seeing what the Boston Police Department was doing, not knowing BFD was about to launch an official site, at twitter.com/bostonfire.
The Boston Fire Department is now on Twitter.
Earlier:
Boston Police jump on Twitter.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
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Comments
Page doesn't exist
Looks like you might have caught them testing.
Name Changed
The username was slightly changed, so the new name is www.twitter.com/Boston_Fire
is this important?
this sudden burst of high tech in the departments.... i'm suspicious.
The lack of formal policy is also very concerning: the department (particularly police) is able to manipulate the information released to the public as this form is far more accessible than standard reports that detail every police-involved incident and that should be written professionally
All in all this is not necessarily a good thing. And don't say "ooooooooh more information" like that's automatically good. it's not, not when you don't know what info you DIDN'T get.
Not sure of your point
Let's consider a few scenarios:
If we go with the premise that the Police are mandated as a public agency to put out a certain amount of information and this is only a subset of that information. If you are suggesting that they would change, alter, or "spin" that information in Twitter, then what happens when someone still goes and gets the original report and calls them out for having twisted or ignored the truth? They won't put out a "cleansed" Twitter feed because the information is still available through the original channels.
If instead we surmise that they didn't have to release this information and so they are releasing more than usual, but in a way that spins or distorts the truth, then we're still now getting more information than we would have otherwise received. That means more information for people to put together to form the big picture. It's the same for police detectives as it is for investigative journalists, the more information, no matter how spun, the better.
So, if it's info they release anyways, more people get it and they'd be caught if they were twisting the truth. If it's info they never would have released before (which I doubt they'd start doing on Twitter for any reason), then it's more info than we had before. It's win-win from our side and they get more exposure for all of the good that they do (suddenly you're hearing about all their positive effects on crime instead of only hearing about drug-dealing cops, corruption by officers, and over-bearing bastards handing out extra tickets to bloggers).
A good point to consider
If you look at the daily summaries BPD posts, you'll see there's a lot of crime they don't put into blog posts, including stuff like stabbings (even compare bpdnews with the reports on www.eastbostonpolice.com).
That having been said, BPD has generally been good about releasing basic info on big crimes (such as murders) and for announcing major policy decisions (reorganizations) or letting us see what Ed Davis is really telling his department after scandals or shakeups.
Twitter potentially lets them get into information you can actually use - which roads to avoid because of fires or accidents or whatnot (which in turn alerts news junkies like me about possible stuff to keep an eye on).
So, no, don't rely on bpdnews as your sole source of news. But don't just rely on the Globe or Channel 7, either.
Boston_Fire twitter is NOT an Official Site
the Boston_Fire twitter site is NOT the official twitter site of the Boston Fire Department.
The official site is @bostonfire
It is not currently active as we are creating the guidance for the information which will be sent
A rogue fire site?
Or, given that one of the tweets pointed to the union, a union site?