NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East

Carvin likens himself to a radio or TV anchor, introducing the experts, the pundits and reporters. The difference, he hastens to add, is that Anderson Cooper has to go to the scene of his stories — and eventually has to go to sleep.

Not Carvin, whose anchor chair goes where he does and whose metabolism seems permanently set on “Go!” Carvin spends his workdays at a bland cubicle at NPR’s headquarters, but his tweets come from wherever he is (his wife, Susanne, says his iPhone is “pretty much an extension of his palm at this point”). He live-tweeted the first attack on protesters in Bahrain while he waited in line at the men’s room in Zaytinya, the downtown D.C. restaurant. He sent updates while at a Duran Duran concert at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at a pirate-themed birthday party in Baltimore with his 4-year-old daughter in tow. He regularly tweets on the Metro during his commute to and from his home in Silver Spring.

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It doesn’t seem at all surprising that he suffers from repetitive stress in his hands and wrists and wears a special pair of corrective gloves when he’s planted at his desk at work.

Oddly enough, the one place Carvin hasn’t tweeted about the Middle East is . . . the Middle East. Carvin has been to Tunisia, Egypt, Israel and several other countries in the region, but has not been back since 2005, a time before Twitter.

Even more oddly: Before the tweet gig came along, the closest Carvin came to professional journalism was co-producing a documentary with his wife about Thai kickboxing. He spent more than a decade after college as a Washington policy wonk, specializing in technology and educational issues for such outfits as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the nonprofit Benton Foundation, for whom Carvin headed a project exploring ways to close the “digital divide” affecting poor communities. In 2006, NPR hired him to help the organization’s journalists make use of new media such as Facebook and Twitter. Carvin started tweeting soon after Twitter launched in 2006, mostly as a way to stay abreast of the news and to keep in touch with friends.

Susanne Carvin, a former National Geographic researcher who raises the couple’s two young children, says she understands her husband’s dedication to the story and the nonstop nature of it. “A few years ago, he would have been glued to a desktop,” she says. “Now, since he can do it all on his [iPhone], he can go to the garden with us, be walking along, check in with his contacts overseas. . . . It has become so commonplace, and he does it so regularly that half the time I don’t even realize he’s online.”

The Carvins’ children, meanwhile, take daddy’s wired habits for granted; his daughter and son, who is 2 ¹ / ₂, have accidentally tweeted when he’s left his laptop unattended. So have the family’s two cats.

Part of the attraction of social media, Carvin says, is how it can be used for crowd-sourcing, or tapping a group’s collective knowledge and experience. During the 2008 election, for example, Carvin marshaled his followers to fact-check the presidential debates and provide tips about polling-place irregularities.