Comments on: Twitizen Journalism: Can Twitter Be a Real News Platform?

By: Justin Kelly

Justin Kelly — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:33:13 +0000

I’m a firm believer in the Twitter as a News Source

I’ve just launched TwitterGrep.com to prove this. TwitterGrep.com takes the latest and greatest from twitter and presents it in a simple NY Times style – making the best Twitter content available to non-twitter users

Cheers

Justin

By: George Hall

George Hall — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:08:36 +0000

It’s like anything. Put your imagination to good use, and 140 characters can still do a lot. During Australia’s recent bushfires, Twitter was put to good use to provide advisories, information from our fire authorities and weather bureau and other sources to give people a heck of a lot to work out the situation with. If it’s not journalism, it’s at least history, giving an idea of what goes through people’s minds during such crises. Thanks to TwitPic, we also had some pretty quick, on the scene photographs of some fires.

And it was still the source that broke the news of two recent minor earth tremors here in the Australian state of Victoria.

By: Gina Chen

Gina Chen — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:57:18 +0000

I really disagree with your definition of journalism. It’s more than breaking news or creating a narrative, and I think twitter is a great tool for journalists. (I have 20 years in newspaper business.)

I don’t think twitter would replace a news story, but I think it’s a good way to tweet breaking news: “Barack Obama won Ohio,” for example. Of course, you need to follow up with a story. But there is value in letting people know really big news really quickly.

Plus twitter is very useful to me as a way to let readers know about good stories we’ve done. I don’t tweet every blog post or every news story; I tweet many of them with a link to a story or a blog post.

I also find twitter as a very useful way to network, find sources for stories, find out what’s topics are buzzing with people in a particular niche. For me, twitter is sort of like having a coffee with sources; it builds a relationship and trust.

It also helps me find out about what other papers and bloggers are writing, so I can link to them or write my own take on the issue they are writing about.

By: Koka Sexton

Koka Sexton — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:07:23 +0000

As far as mainstream news leveraging Twitter to send information, they are doing a good job. There are hundred of news agencies using Twitter publishing breaking news. I collected a list of them for my site and that is really only a fraction of all the mainstream news agencies on Twitter.

By: Anna

Anna — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:36:14 +0000

I, as a citizen journalist, use Twitter as a tool, not a substitute for journalism. I use it to keep people interested and engaged in the topic I cover and get them thinking about it more if they aren’t already. I still want them to read what I write, not just interact on Twitter.

By: Rishabh Kaul

Rishabh Kaul — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:11:16 +0000

Last night there Mumbai was taken over by terrorists. I found out about the incident through twitter. And the I found the updates far better than the ones I was watching on TV about the same time.

Twitter can certainly help in making journalism a faster process, however twitter does have its shortcomings. Its tough to do an analysis on twitter. Twitter is a tool which will be very effective in journalism but can’t really survive on its own. At the end of the day you will be posting links to other people’s blogs and news items.

But as far as updates are given, its fast merely because of the less amount of effort it takes to tweet a headline rather than carefully weave a news item.

Twitter for citizen journalism yes. For mainstream journalism, I’d say it’ll be a valuable asset, but not the real deal.

By: Gaurav Mishra

Gaurav Mishra — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:41:29 +0000

Twitter has played a really important role in covering the Mumbai terrorist attacks today. Mahalo has a separate page for the Twitter coverage of the terrorist attacks and CNN has also mentioned Twitter as a source. Here's a roundup I am doing on the role of social media, including Twitter, in the coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

By: Nisha Chittal

Nisha Chittal — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:30:45 +0000

I think Twitter has become a great medium for breaking news, and there are often times news is reported faster on Twitter than by the mainstream media outlets. It’s great because not only do you get the breaking news updates, but you immediately get to see the conversation about it too– watching my twitter stream during the election season was always interesting, because you could see what people were talking about and thinking as it happened. Today, also, I heard about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on Twitter first, and right away everyone in my twitter stream was talking about it, and I got to see various perspectives in one giant conversation as the story continued to unfold.

I read somewhere that twitter is like “taking a pulse of the internet” — when something major happens in the news, there’s almost always a conversation about it on twitter, which I think is part of the value of Twitter for news. Journalism? Not really. But it’s great for news.

By: Maija Haavisto

Maija Haavisto — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:09:50 +0000

As a journalist my opinion is that a single tweet cannot really be considered journalism, but someone’s Twitter stream as a whole could be – say, someone travels to a jungle, lives with the indigenous people and reports from there via Twitter (I don’t know if you can have mobile coverage in such a place, but hypothetically speaking).

By: Hector A. Henry S.

Hector A. Henry S. — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:43:45 +0000

In Colombia for instance the news papers have twitters account and i don’t know but to my imprison they do a good work whit it.

so what matter its that they do a good job, and sow the right teme to call other user atention.