NBC News’ Ann Curry on Twit­ter from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, spoke ani­mat­edly at the 140 Char­ac­ter Con­fer­ence in New York last Mon­day about the impor­tance of news and jour­nal­ism as a pub­lic ser­vice rather than a busi­ness and the grow­ing impact of social media ser­vices like Twit­ter.

I caught up with her as she was leav­ing and did a 3-minute video inter­view before her han­dlers ush­ered her away.

“Jour­nal­ism is an act of faith in the future, and it is a war,” she said. “Often­times I feel blood­ied with a sword unsheathed. That’s because you’re fight­ing for sto­ries that you want covered.”

Curry smartly uses Twit­ter as a sort of elec­tronic news­pa­per to spread the word about sto­ries that didn’t make it on air. (She tweets almost daily at @AnnCurry.) She points to the fact that many impor­tant sto­ries don’t get a lot of atten­tion — in both tra­di­tional media and on Twit­ter. View­ers and users “want to watch some­thing more sala­cious and that makes me crazy,” and dur­ing the panel she bemoaned the items that often receive the most atten­tion on sites like Twitter.

She says of Twit­ter: “I look at Twit­ter as my own two-way broad­cast­ing. I put things out, I hear things back, I gain from people’s per­spec­tives all over the world. … I don’t feel threat­ened [by Twit­ter and new forms of media], I feel excited.”

Curry is one of the most capa­ble, smart and forward-looking jour­nal­ists in broad­cast news (see her Wikipedia entry), so it’s great news that she has embraced Twit­ter with such gusto. Here’s the New York Observer’s cov­er­age of her pub­lic com­ments dur­ing last week’s conference.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo

Related posts:
• Con­nect­ing with your com­mu­nity through Twit­ter
• NPR’s exper­i­ments with social media
• Using Twit­ter at the Chicago Tri­bune

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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