The Social Journalist: @mchancecnn

“#Rixos crisis ends. All journalists are out! #rixos”

A few weeks ago, we watched the country of Libya begin to breath once again, after years of being suffocated by the regime of Moammar Kadafi'. At the heart of this fight was a group of 35 journalists from around the world, being held inside the Rixos hotel, located in the center of Tripoli. The hotel grounds were surrounded by armed Kadafi' forces who also made their presence known in the lobby and for five days the journalist were told that they could not leave.

One of the journalists hulled up in the Rixos was Matthew Chance, a senior international correspondent for CNN based in Moscow. During his traumatic time being “held hostage” his broadcasted his story and that of his fellow journalist to the world via Twitter. He engulfed Twitter with information, detailing every stage of a situation which many feared would end in disaster-many of the journalist spoke after their release saying that they feared they would eventually be executed or used in some way by the regime as collateral.

Matthew’s tweets allowed his followers and the rest of the world to get a view of the crisis in Libya, and the situation inside the Rixos unlike any other. During a time of such heightened emotions and with so many channels of information to filter through, Matthews tweets were a way to get straight to the facts. He tweeted exactly what was happening, as it happened, not taking into consideration the possible risks he was taking. Additionally, since Kadafi' forces had taken away their telephone access, Twitter was the only way for those being held inside the hotel to communicate with their loved ones.

"I think as you're following somebody, you can really get a sense of what's going on in a more intimate way than virtually any other medium," Matthew told the BBC a few weeks after the event. "I felt that I was communicating with a whole bunch of people who wanted to know more. Twitter offered a much fuller, more intimate look inside the hotel.”

At the start of the crisis, Chance had 700 followers on Twitter. By the time of his release from the Rixos Hotel, this number had grown to 22,000.