USYD Sumo

Disclaimer: maybe not ideal for walking. Photo by: Jessica Glanz

Back within ranch, Huw had myself working on several other fishy tales. We had written articles in regards to the excessive cost of becoming the main sponsor during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (15 billion yen) and although it absolutely was a measly 275 terms, it had been my very first article that performedn’t obtain a serious face-lift within the modifying process.

On Tuesday two Japanese nationals had been held at gunpoint by ISIS militants demanding the Japanese government pay a $200 million ransom with regards to their release. It absolutely was amazing to see just what a news bureau appears like whenever ‘real’ development takes place and now we get into overdrive. For a start, AFP was among the first to report the big event. Within an hour we'd numerous articles in the cable detailing who the hostages were, what they looked like and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s reaction. I became also actually impressed because of the swiftness of AFP’s fact-checking procedure and their particular reluctance to utilize the dreadful ‘t’ word before verifying it was indeed a terrorist assault.

As for me, I happened to be on Twitter task. It had been interesting to report the occasions as they unfolded in real-time. Ends up I coined the trending hashtag for the occasion (“Japanesehostages”) and was in charge of summarising the important thing details while they took place. In typical British humour, Huw joked that I became “sculpting the world-wide-web, ” but We soon realised that being on social media duty for a global business had been harder than uploading your usual pet meme.

Photo by: Mashable.com

In fact, it comes having its very own set of regulations that aren’t dissimilar to those governing old-fashioned journos. It was a tough balancing act — Twitter requires you to be succinct and lightening fast but also highly accurate ... one wrong move and the embarrassing post could be retweeted across the globe in seconds.

we encountered a tough choice when our bureau unearthed that the hostages, Haruna Yukawa, had a brief history of attempted committing suicide together with effectively take off his or her own genitals after the death of their spouse. Of course this would have made an entertaining Twitter post. It absolutely was obvious a post like this becoming shared many times, increasing our followers and web presence. In the end I selected not to tweet about any of it — I thought it was incorrect to derail the discussion and trivialise the thing that was a remarkably tight and serious circumstance.

Did we mention AFP is just about the corner from a nine-storey Uniqlo? Picture by: Jessica Glanz