Tweeting names of 9/11 victims
Posted at 11:17 p.m., Oct. 21, 2011
An example of the names posted to @NewsHourLive.
An example of the names posted to @NewsHourLive.
Some said we made the number of victims "more human".
Others said we helped to provide a sense of scale.
The NewsHour had several projects related to the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks both for the Web and for the broadcast special we produced for PBS, but possibly the simplest one — and definitely the one that affected me the most as I worked on it — was a memorial in the form of a Twitter feed.
Social media production assistant Teresa Gorman came to me with the idea and asked if we could tweet all of the victims' names on Sept. 11, but we both agreed there was no way Twitter would let us dump almost 3,000 status updates on them over the course of a few hours. Twitter's usual rate limit is 1,000 status updates per day, so I ended up putting together a simple script to post one name to @NewsHourLive (which we normally used for livetweeting events) at random whenever it ran and schedule it to run about once every minute and a half.
It ran for three days and a few hours, and the response was much more positive than I expected. We definitely lost some followers in the beginning who considered it a form of spam, but we gained a few hundred more who said it gave the attacks a more human perspective and a new sense of scale.
Those 75 hours or so of tweets probably made up my most nerve-wracking operations experience to date — not because of the complexity of the application, but because I felt like any problems or omissions would be some form of disservice. The feeling that was echoed in some of the responses we got — the names just kept coming — was overwhelming and absolutely humbling.