Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist for National Public Radio (NPR), addressed RTDNA and SPJ conventioneers Tuesday morning, encouraging them to cultivate sources by nurturing communities through social media, and he urged the audience to understand that social media are experiments in progress.
Carvin, viewed as a guru of "the new age newswire," is known to tweet over one hundred times a day, and actually sent more than 1400 Twitter messages on one eventful day during the recent Arab uprisings.
Carvin's Twitter handle "@acarvin" is well known to NPR fans, but he insists that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a reporter.
Prior to joining NPR, Carvin worked for the Digital Divide Network, addressing information access issues for the United Nations, and in North Africa and South Asia. Joining NPR in 2006, Carvin maintains that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media enable him to indulge his natural bent for collaboration. Carvin told the RTDNA/SPJ audience, "I don't know how to work without asking help from people."
Carvin began tweeting in 2007, and says that at first his tweets were mundane observations of family life, food, and frustrations like delayed flights. Finding himself stranded in an airport on the day of the reported assassination of Pakistan leader Benazir Bhutto, he attempted to verify the report via his Twitter community, and found that he was able to get reliable, corroborated information in real time. Bhutto was confirmed dead.
Carvin soon harnessed Twitter to the service of journalism, heading up NPR Politics, which used audience crowd sourcing to do real time fact checking of claims made by candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign debates.
Displaying the text of actual tweets from the Arab Spring, Carvin illustrated how social media can enable the geometric progression of social movements. He recounted how the protest act of self-immolation by one vegetable vendor in Tunisia went viral, leading to the ouster of the nation's president within four weeks. Soon the protest would spread to Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and Bahrain.
Turbo tweeting of the type Carvin does requires tools, and he employs Tweetdeck, mapping tools to display the locations of his Twitter community members, and visualization programs that illustrate the world's six degrees of separation.
Twitter has enabled Carvin to access the knowledge of crowds to translate Arabic (both spoken and written), to identify exact locations throughout the Middle East, to identify recovered munitions, and to debunk internet rumors that could otherwise lead to violence. A case in point was an apparent Israeli bomb shell reportedly sold in bulk to Libya. The shell bore a six pointed star, but Carvin's Twitter followers were able to identify the shell as an illumination shell, fired into the night sky to provide light to ground troops. The six pointed star indicates such an illumination shell, and the symbol has been used by manufacturers throughout the world for about one hundred years, and is not related to Israeli munitions makers. Carvin and his "crowd" had defused what could have been a powerful impetus to violence on the part of indignant Libyans.
"Situational awareness" is the term Carvin applies to the wide view he takes in from his "virtual helicopter." On one real world venture to Tahir Square, Carvin recounted being trapped by tear gas, unable to access the global sourcing that is usually his through Twitter and Facebook. Real world reporters get trapped, he said, and they lose sources, but crowd sourcing offers dozens, scores, or even hundreds more informants in real time.
Carvin encouraged RTDNA/SPJ conventioneers to take up their cellphones and engage the virtual crowd in these new social media, an ongoing experiment for him, and for journalists throughout the world: "The only way we can find out, is to try it out."
Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist for National Public Radio (NPR), addressed RTDNA and SPJ conventioneers Tuesday morning, encouraging them to cultivate sources by nurturing communities through social media, and he urged the audience to understand that social media are experiments in progress.
Carvin soon harnessed Twitter to the service of journalism, heading up NPR Politics, which used audience crowd sourcing to do real time fact checking of claims made by candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign debates. 
