Twitter may not be for everyone but thanks to its users it has turned news reporting on its head.

From GigaOm

There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.

One of the most recent examples came several days ago, when a Japanese journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan managed to trick his captors into letting him post a message about his location to Twitter. It’s not clear from the news reports whether his tweets helped get him released or not, but it is yet another example of how easy Twitter makes it to broadcast that kind of news — and not just to one or two people, the way email or text messaging does, but to potentially hundreds or even thousands (in 2008, Twitter helped American photojournalist James Buck spread the news that he had been arrested by Egyptian police while covering an anti-government protest).

Two other examples of Twitter as a news platform are the recent hostage-taking and shootout at Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, and the earthquake that hit near New Zealand last week. In the first case, reports about a gunman in the Discovery building started coming in before the news was on a mainstream news outlet. And in the case of the earthquake — as in similar cases involving earthquakes in China and forest fires in California — reports flooded the Twitter network while most mainstream media outlets were still unaware that it had even occurred. One resident said she relied on news she got from Twitter more than the radio, because it was a lot faster (although it should be noted that she is a Twitter fan and web consultant).

Obviously, Twitter reports aren’t going to contain a complete accounting of an event like an earthquake or a shooting, but it has become just as obvious that they can be a powerful tool for “man on the street” or eyewitness accounts, whether it’s the fires in California or a plane landing in the middle of the Hudson River. In the case of the Discovery Channel situation, reporters described how useful this was because it acted as “an early alert system” on what was happening. In fact, earlier this year researchers looked at the flow of content on the network and found that Twitter is far more of a news medium than it is a traditional social network.

Since the protests in Iran last year, there has been a lot of debate about how important Twitter was during those demonstrations, and whether it was actually used by dissidents or merely by sympathizers in the West. But there’s no question that it helped spread the news of events such as the shooting death of protester Neda Soltan — which many saw as a key moment in the protests — and that it was important enough that the Obama government contacted the company to ask that it delay scheduled maintenance on the network while the protests were going on. The network has been used in a similar way in protests in Burma and elsewhere.

The thread that ties all of these events together is simple: Twitter, like blogging did before it, puts the tools of publishing in anyone’s hands. And yes, that means the information flowing through the network is not always accurate — hoaxes are a routine part of the stream — but it also means that there are thousands more eyeballs and brains studying those reports than there would be at any mainstream media outlet. The bottom line is one that journalism professor Jay Rosen reiterated during a recent address to journalism students in Paris: the “people formerly known as the audience” have the tools to become part of the media now, and that is changing our society in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.

The rapid growth of Twitter has as Rosen said turned the audience into a part of the media.  Not everyone using the platform reports what would be considered news but as Twitter has grown so have the reports of breaking events far faster than the traditional media.

This has led to some unusual methods of tweeting.  In addition to the instances mentioned above there was a report the other day of a journalist who tweeted a 1,000 word story on a verdict against Ford Motor that he said had been ignored by the mainstream media.  What makes this interesting is that due to Twitter’s 140 character (not word) limit it took him 50 tweets over two hours to tell his story.

Frankly that’s way too much work to get the story out and even then you have to get people to read all 50 tweets in order to get the full story so I don’t think Twitter can replace long form journalism.

However the value in a platform like Twitter is the ability of the user to get the news out in seconds to a potential worldwide audience through the multiplier effect of retweets.  This means that as each of my 4900 followers retweets something that I posted the potential exists for that one simple tweet to be read by tens of thousands of people and all at little or no cost.

What Twitter and other social media platforms have done is feed the demand for a 24/7 news cycle.  It used to be a newspaper would put an edition to bed at 10 or 11 at night and deliver yesterday’s news early the next morning.  In the pre-web world no one really complained because there wasn’t an alternative with the exception of television news but they were tethered to a cycle of a.m., mid-day, evening and late night to fill in the gaps but that amounted to less than four hours a day in total of news.

In an effort to compete newspapers have extended their deadlines and television news has added several hours to their schedules with some programs airing news beginning at 4 a.m. to capture a larger audience but nothing can compete with the ease and convenience of receiving a brief short tweet with a link on a mobile device that gives the user instant news wherever and whenever the want.

Yes, Twitter may have its flaws and critics but there is no denying that they have in a very short time become a news platform and is a threat t supplant much of the traditional media in the future.

Think of it as USA Today on steroids.

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author