During a special live chat sponsored on Thursday by Poynter, LA Times reporter Kate Linthicum and reader engagement editor Martin Beck discussed the role that Twitter and Facebook played in their coverage of the Occupy LA movement.

Beck mentioned that to locate the best hashtags and thus monitor the most dynamic Twitter eyewitness accounts, one of his favorite tools was and remains whatthetrend.com. He also said that both TweetDeck and Hoot Suite were invaluable in helping parse the identified, trustworthy Tweeters.

As a reporter, Linthicum figured out ways to take full advantage of the army of Ustream-ers:

“I would walk around camp and ask the people with cameras for their Twitter handles. I’d know when they were posting videos online, and then I could monitor what was going on from my computer, even when I wasn’t at the camp…”

“It can be tough to find what you’re looking for on the Ustream site, though. I found it was easiest to follow a Twitter or Facebook link from a livestreamer I already knew.”

The video above is an example of something Linthicum found and posted on the LAT website. To read more from the August 16 chat, click here.