Denver’s “Black Anthem” Mashup: Missed Opportunity for Engagement

When jazz singer Rene Marie performed a civil rights anthem to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner just before a major speech by Denver’s mayor, a local TV news station missed a key opportunity to quickly spotlight a controversy of interest to the local African American community. Here’s how Twitter can help your news org keep from missing such opportunities…

Yesterday in Denver, at the opening ceremonies of the mayor’s annual “state of the city” address, local jazz singer Rene Marie gave an unexpected performance. Instead of singing the Star Spangled Banner, she combined the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice” with the tune of the national anthem.

Popularly known as the “black national anthem,” Lift Every Voice was written in 1899 as a poem by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. It was first performed in 1900, and gained popularity through the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Understandably, Marie’s surprise performance has sparked a heated local controversy—especially since Barack Obama was speaking today in Colorado Springs.

I live in Boulder, Colo., just north of Denver, and I’m an avid Twitter user. So I follow several local news organizations via Twitter—including our local ABC affiliate, KMGH-TV Channel 7 News, which posts ("tweets") under the Twitter ID DenverChannel.

Yesterday morning, about an hour before the speech was slated to start, DenverChannel tweeted, “We will be livestreaming Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City speech at 11 a.m. on our various online platforms.” A subsequent tweet included a link to the live video. I wanted to watch it, but got caught up with work, which pushed the coverage down on my priority list. Which is why I missed Marie’s performance.

This morning, I learned what happened via an instant message from a friend. I was puzzled why, since 7 News had been running live video coverage of the event (including the anthem), they hadn’t tweeted when something so obvious and unexpected started happening.

So I called 7 News and spoke to Wayne Harrison, who runs the station’s Twitter presence. He told me that no one in the newsroom paid attention to the video feed until Hickenlooper started talking; they didn’t realize the controversy until after the fact.

It’s understandable that in a city with relatively few African Americans (according to 2006 U.S. Census data, Denver is 68 percent white, 35 percent Latino, and only 10 percent black), and which wasn’t a leading locale in the civil rights movement, local journalists might not immediately recognize the words or significance of “Lift Every Voice.” However, when something obviously and deliberately different is happening with a deeply symbolic aspect of a public ceremony, shouldn’t any journalist’s “news radar” kick in?

Also, even if you don’t quite understand what’s happening—if you’re providing live coverage and something noticeably unusual happens, shouldn’t you draw attention to it while it’s happening?

I don’t mean to criticize 7 News. It’s admirable that they have a Twitter presence and tweet daily. Also, every journalist misses a breaking story sometime. That said, yesterday 7 News (and other Denver-area news orgs covering the event) missed an opportunity to immediately engage their audience in figuring out what was happening and what it might mean—and thus to highlight a matter of potential important to Denver’s black community.

A simple quick heads-up tweet from DenverChannel such as “Live: Local jazz singer appears to be changing lyrics of the national anthem at Denver Mayor’s speech,” followed by a link to the video stream, might have quickly brought several viewers to the live online video. Then, one of those viewers might have sent a fast reply via Twitter to DenverChannel along the lines of, “She’s singing a famous civil rights movement song, this will definitely infuriate some folks.”

Getting such clues from social media might have helped 7 News get at least an initial story about the controversy onto its site much faster than 3:26 p.m. Mountain Time—hours after the event.

Social media like Twitter are mainly about what’s happening right this moment. That makes your “posse” of social media “followers” especially useful when something potentially newsworthy seems to be happening, but its meaning isn’t immediately clear to the journalists who happen to be covering the event. We all have our cultural “filters” and sometimes can use extra help understanding how events might relate to various communities.

A service like Twitter, which has a simple text messaging interface, might be especially useful in reaching out to black and Latino communities. Even the most basic cell phones can send and receive text messages. And, as we noted in our recent Total Community Coverage Best Practices series, research shows that U.S. blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to use their cell phones for text messaging and other non-voice uses on a typical day.

So if your news org wants to reach out more effectively to cell-phone-loving communities of difference, it makes more sense than ever to have a strong Twitter presence. Specifically, you can:

• Promote your Twitter updates as a text-messaging service (rather than only as an “online” or “Web” service)—especially in your marketing to communities of difference.
• Provide an info phone number or extension that people can call to hear instructions on how to sign up for Twitter, get your updates, and interact with you via Twitter’s “@ reply” convention. (Useful people with limited Internet access)
• Post to Twitter first whenever something unusual happens during live coverage—especially if you don’t immediately understand it.
• Configure your Twitter account so you receive “@ replies” from anyone (Not just from people you follow, or who follow you). Make sure you regularly glance at incoming @ replies—especially when you just tweeted about breaking news.