Live-tweeting the 4M Forum in October
From October 17-19, seven journalism students from the Department of Communication Arts covered the 4M Forum on twitter. The forum is a three-day international conference on digital journalism and was organized by the French media consortium (CFI) and the Samir Kassir Foundation.
It brought together a select group of online journalists and media producers from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Tunisia, Morocco, Europe, and the USA to discuss the impact of digital technology on journalism in the Arab world.
Live-tweeting is a very demanding form of reporting. It requires picking the right quotes and phrasing them into the right words in real time, with a character limit. LAU students - Maya Mansour, Safa Hamzeh, Naima Haidar, Gasia Trtrian, Kinda Hanna, Christina Fakhry and Farah Saydoun - mastered the challenge courageously and received great admiration for their work.
The event’s twitter account gained 4,000 additional followers over the weekend, creating greater exposure for the event.
The conference was an excellent opportunity to gain hands-on experience and to network with well-established digital media producers from all over the Arab region and other parts of the world. The students were extremely excited about this and showed great talent in promoting themselves and the skills they acquired at LAU.
The Department is working hard to provide other similar opportunities in the future.