Montgomery County schools on Twitter, canvassing the masses

Now this is why I joined Twitter — prom updates.

The Perkiomen Valley School District in Collegeville, Pa. and the Jenkintown School District, both of which are in Montgomery County, are using the microblogging service.

They are spreading school news and information to the masses, or, well, 62 and 21 Twitter accounts, respectively. To be fair, though, neither of them suffer the following of users like Sexplatorium.

“Now, parents will know where to go to get the information they need,” said one of the followers, Mary Ellen Polaski, mother of a 10th grader. “You don’t have the time to go all over the [district] Web site, finding out what’s going on. This is one-stop shopping.”

Can the Philadelphia general interest newspaper thrive with technology?

The news flew through Twitter like the California fire storm that helped bring the micro-blogging utility to mainstream consumption.

Before a newsroom meeting broke, Pulitzer-Prize winning phtographer Jim MacMillan tweeted that the Daily News was being folded into its older, more mature, less fun sister publication, the Philadelphia Inquirer. The message from MacMillan, formerly of the Daily News, was quickly clarified by Philly.com Editor Wendy Warren, a Daily News alumnae herself. Before then though, Inquirer online editor Chris Krewson had cleared the message for anyone who cared.

The Philadelphia Daily News will at the end of March be considered an edition of the Inquirer, though their staffs and competition will remain the same, for now.

Of course, what’s interesting is that the unsettling, if not undercutting, news of the People Paper first came to the masses via the latest fashionable social media, just the type of tool that newspaper executives seem to suggest could save the general interest urban daily. Well, that or kill it.

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