Twitter’s Place in Breaking News
Yesterday a plane crashed as it was trying to take off from Denver International Airport as @BreakingNewsOn told us. (as an aside, BreakingNewsOn is without question my favorite news source on twitter. I don’t really know how they do it, but they get breaking news fast.) Then a while later it filtered through twitter that @2drinksbehind was actually on the plane in question and was tweeting about it. He is thankfully safe and none of the injured are in critical condition.
Pete Cashmore of Mashable just put up this quick post about Twitter beating the main stream press as usual but he ended it with a good point:
And yet, breaking the news is by no means the only role of news agencies: parsing that raw information, and filtering it, and making sense of it in a broader context, is where news organizations continue to shine.
That got me thinking about Twitter’s place in the whole process of news. Twitter and other web 2.0 tools are not going to kill mainstream media (I’m not sure many people think they are), but they have (as far as I can tell) two main advantages.
- Speed: Twitter especially can put out information more or less instantly. This has already been shown with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai as well as the Current.tv discussions during the Presidential debates. As far as legitimately breaking news (as in, “holy crap my plane just crashed 5 minutes ago”-breaking) Twitter (or similar services) have stolen the spotlight and will continue to do so. As Cashmore points out, however– there is nothing filtered (or fact checked) about this style of delivery.
- Humanity: I’m not calling the news industry a bunch of robots (some of my favorite people are journos) but the objective (or not.. that’s not the discussion I’m trying to have) style of reporting allows for a good deal less personal touch than a tweet or blog post or comment about an event. As @jesseluna observed earlier, different people tweeting about the crash last night provided different details because they all had different experiences. This creates much richer and more personal event coverage; something we rarely have a chance to see in main stream media.
These were just some of my thoughts. This isn’t an attack on the news industry, merely a commentary on the way twitter and other tools are changing the way we receive news.
As usual, please leave your thoughts in the comments! If you’d like to have comments emailed to you check out Feed My Inbox.
This entry was posted on December 21, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: breaking news, Denver plane crash, mainstream media, mashable, news, pete cashmore, Social Media, twitter
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
December 21, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Great analysis Kathleen. There’s no doubt that we’ve reached a point in social media (especially on Twitter) where our roles as “news sources” and “citizen journalists” are blurring. But as you point out, mainstream media is still very relevant. Twitter is not killing the news organizations, it’s available to augment them.
December 21, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Jesse, I totally agree. I think that the organizations which manage to utilize social media in really meaningful (and flexible) ways are the ones that will find a lot of loyalty from their readers… Especially as technologies and trends change, if a certain org is known as the one that keeps their public interactions current (like switching from forums to blog comments to utilizing Twitter, etc) they will be the one that has the reputation for having their finger on the pulse of the public, if you’ll excuse the cliche.
Twitter is the “it” thing now. but the way we use the internet is constantly evolving. Best to keep up :)
January 13, 2009 at 3:26 pm
i’m one of those journalists trying to use Twitter, and i’m thinking it’s the most invaluable tool that is the least intuitive to use. Sigh.
So my question to you, social media guru. :) is how do you find out what crowdsourcing tags are being used? Ie: I posted an article today about traveling to D.C. for the inauguration, and then found out that I should have used #dctrip09 and #inaug09. Also, not incredibly obvious things I would’ve known.
Still learning all this too. :)
January 16, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Hi, Carmen. I’m by no means a social media guru, but I’m certainly an enthusiast. In terms of “hashtags,” a good way to see which hashtags and other words are trending is to go to http://search.twitter.com and there is a short list there. Twitter search is one of the most useful tools you’ll find for twitter because it searches in real time. Play around with it and you’ll see what it can do.
All of us are still learning :)
April 25, 2009 at 11:24 am
You might try @wthashtag in Twitter ot wthashtag.com — also @wefollow in Twitter.
i.e. if you look up inauguration or obama in wthashtag, you’ll find appropriate #hashtags, such as #POTUS and #inaug09.
http://twitter.com/wthashtag
http://twitter.com/wefollow
There are others too I’m sure.