Twitter, it seems, has made it through the gates of the Old Bailey. According to a report on Today this morning, the live reports of the Stephen Lawrence murder trial that you were watching on your TV screens were delivered to the reporter via tweets from journalists inside the court.
While I do wonder whether such ‘open’ reporting by anyone inside the court room may get abused (the Today report did stress importance of only accepting tweets from ‘reliable’ sources inside the courtroom) it certainly would suggest that Twitter has come totally of age, if anyone still had any doubts, as a mainstream purveyor of news.
In purely personal terms, it does give me a warm glow of satisfaction that we decided this year, while still seeking publicity for our various awards (FreeFrom Food and now FreeFrom Skincare) in the traditional media, to focus our main efforts on social media – Twitter, Facebook and bloggers.
For those who tweet, both awards have their own Twitter accounts, @FFFoodAwards and @FFSkincareAward (and of course they feature in our other tweets on @FoodsMatter, @CoeliacsMatter and @SkinsMatter too); we also have two Facebook accounts FoodsMatter and Skinsmatter. But this week I have been working with food bloggers, specifically allergy and gluten-free food bloggers – some of whom are old friends, others will soon, we hope, be new friends!
Indeed a number of gluten-free bloggers have now joined our judging panels for the FreeFrom Food Awards (the judging takes place over the first two weeks of February – the site, this post and this post for how we set about it). Who better to judge freefrom foods than those who use them and feel passionately enough about them to start, and keep writing, a blog about them? They will join freefrom food professionals (manufacturers, chefs and cookery writers), nutritionists and dietitians, coeliacs and allergy sufferers and a certain number of ‘ordinary people’ to benchmark the foods against their non-free from equivalents, for five days heavy judging in the first two weeks of February. More anon….
Meanwhile, if you want to catch up with our freefrom bloggers – and see what they have to say about their experiences as judges you can follow:
dublinwithfoodallergies.blogspot.com
www.hellomagazine.com/freefromkitchen
www.glutenfreestudentcookbook.co.uk
and then of course there are our old friends:
www.foodallergyandintolerance.com This is Alex Gazzola’s blog where he writes regularly about coeliac disease – indeed there is a heated argument going on there right now on the subject of the 20ppm gluten levels…. Alex has been a judge ever since the awards started.
www.whatallergy.com Ruth suffers from multiple allergies (nuts and milk are the worst). She came to last year’s awards party but this is the first time that she will have been on some of our judging panels.
www.trulyglutenfree.co.uk Micki Rose did come to a couple of judging sessions last year but because she was, at that point, so sensitive, she was really unable to taste more than a couple of products – and she even got reactions from those. However, she is doing so well on her ‘truly gluten free’ diet that I am hoping that, by the time next year’s judging sessions come round, she will be able to take part properly.
[…] problems themselves or been closely involved with some who had – and of course our new crop of ‘blogging judges’ all of whom have had very personal experience of living freefrom – and are delightfully vocal on […]