The top Twitter trends for Australia Monday 25th July 2016 included #FacesofInnocents, #Kitty Chiller , #Nerang and #4Corners.
I had no idea what some of these hashtags meant but chose to investigate the top trending tag. I could not find any reference to this topic in my local news and after further research I also could not find any news coverage in Australian news media. All hashtags took me to NZ media coverage. It isn’t clear why it was the top Australian trending topic, but received no Australian media coverage that I could locate.
Another top Twitter trend was #Nerang. I immediately found a lot of media coverage, including from local news sites.
The Rockhampton Morning Bulletin covered the story and included tweets from ABC Gold Coast. They also included video statements from Queensland Police .
ABC News also covered the topic and included a tweet, which was their own in the news article.
ABC News
Coverage on this story seemed to be mostly limited to Queensland news Twitters, however Sky News and Nine News Australia also live tweeted the story.
The amber alert first broke on the QPS Media Unit Twitter page.
QPS Media Unit
In cases such as Amber alerts and breaking news stories, Twitter can provide a vital role in spreading news quickly. Police commissioner Ian Stewart said that by issuing alerts through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, the public will be alerted sooner and missing children in danger will hopefully be located quickly (Harazim, K 2015).
At the time of publishing this blog post, the young girl still had not been found.
25/7/2016 Update-
ABC News Brisbane reports that the missing 5 year old girl has been found.
References
ABC News Brisbane [ABCNewsBrisbane] 2016, ‘Police have confirmed a 5yo girl missing on the Gold Coast has been found safe and well’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/ABCNewsBrisbane
ABC News 2016, ‘Amber Alert: Overnight search fails to find missing 5yo Gold Coast girl Jocelyn’, ABC News, 25 July , viewed 25 July 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/amber-alert-five-year-old-girl-missing-on-gold-coast/7656748
Furler, M 2016, ‘UPDATE: Residents asked to check yards for missing Jocelyn’, The Morning Bulletin, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, http://m.themorningbulletin.com.au/news/massive-search-five-year-old-girl-vanishes/3066720/?ref=hs
Harazim, K 2015, ‘Child abduction ‘Amber Alert’ system introduced in Queensland’, ABC News, 28 September, viewed 25 July 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-28/new-amber-alert-child-abduction-system-in-queensland/6810926
Millward, J [JessMillward9] 2016, ‘Police on foot, in cars, in the air and now on horseback all desperately searching for 5 yo Jocelyn.’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/JessMillward9
QPS Media Unit [QPSMedia] 2016, ‘The latest on the #AmberAlert at #Nerang. Please RT & help us find Jocelyn. #alert’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/QPSmedia
Rafferty, M [raffertyreports] 2016, ‘What an amazing community you are Carrara. Residents here to search for a missing 5-year-old girl.’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/raffertyreports
Sky News Australia [SkyNewsAust] 2016, ‘Police and SES continue their search for 5 year old Jocelyn who ran away from home in Nerang yesterday’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust
Stevens, M [MarkStevens] 2016, ‘NZ’s Child Victim Toll: 14 in 2015.’, Tweet, 25 July, viewed 25 July 2016, https://twitter.com/Mark_Stevens
Rebecca Ward 
Hi Rebecca,
A great blog post :). Your writing was simple and to-the-point, and your paragraphs were small, which made the post easy to read.
There were just two small things I picked up on when reading your post:
1) I had to read this sentence “It seemed to be that Queensland news media were covering the breaking story more than national news” a few times before I could understand it, so it might need to be reworded a little. Perhaps try reading your blog post aloud to yourself before posting it to be sure it makes sense :).
2) There were a few proper nouns in the post that didn’t have capital letters, such as (T)witter, Sky (N)ews and Nine (N)ews Australia. I believe these should have been capitalised.
Other than that, an awesome post :).
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Thank you so much for your help! It can be easy to miss those obvious errors.
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Really well written and thorough. Good job at answering all of the questions as well.
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Hi Rebecca, interesting article to read I particularly liked how you incorporated so many screenshots of the evidence you were writing about. Just for future reference there is an option on Twitter to see the top trends in Australia, I believe this would be more accurate then using the website that you used. One other thing, related to the reference list, you’re missing a space between the fourth and fifth reference. A little picky I know, but other than that it is an excellent blog post !
-Max
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thank you for your help! good pickup on the reference. I’m not sure why wordpress does that . I find I have to put 3-4 enters between each references to stop it doing that.
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Hi Rebecca. I really enjoyed reading this post. I particularly liked that you put an update in about the missing girl. Would it be possible to put a little more information in the update? Eg. where she was found, what happened ect..
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