Is Twitter the future of news?
Friday, March 7th, 2008Techdirt asks whether Twitter and other blogging services could replace partially traditional journalism, by enabling on-the-spot reporting by amateur eyewitnesses. The article suggests that “if mainstream news outlets can get better at tapping these kinds of decentralized news sources, they should be able to report more news with fewer reporters.” I can see the argument - news of the recent UK earthquake broke on Twitter long before any news site had a story. But on the other hand, real reporting requires thought, analysis, contextualisation. Those qualities (to me) are more important than getting the story a few minutes earlier. Newspapers, to me, are caught in a bind - they’re slower than the web, but don’t contain as much depth as magazine or journal articles. Which is why I don’t read print papers anymore, and my online news reading habits are highly omnivorous - newspapers are just one option.