So I have been thinking about twitter and what it means to journalism and news and as I did so a discussion from my history class popped into my head.
This discussion was about the worth of first hand accounts to learn about history events. The class debated about how these first hand accounts contained biases, and although enlightening and interesting a true student of history could not rely on one first hand account alone in order to understand the picture as a whole.
It seems to me that each twitter post although invaluable to developing a fuller story is just describing one a single tree. With apparent limitations, such as a 140 word count limit, mini bloging sites such as twitter make it impossible to fully describe a whole forest.
Most recently Twitter was pushed into the spot light with articles such as “Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks” published by the New York Times.
Perhaps the most important question is how is all of this affecting journalism in general and our traditional news media?
Yes Twitter is becoming in-valuable, but to who?
With that in mind I am going to have to say that these blog sites are truly valuable to a true journalist or news organization that has the time and resources to analyze and use them.
Back to my discussion in my history class it was pointed out that it is the traditional history book that is able to take all the historical fist hand accounts and boil them down into something that can be easily understood for a beginning level history class.
Like wise it is our newspapers, TV, and Radio stations who are using the first hand insightful tweets to present a well understood story of what is happening.
Blogs and tweets will not make traditional news media obsolete, but it will enhance their ability to accurately unfold important news at record speeds.
2 comments:
I liked your thoughts on this, especially because your perspective on microblogging was different than what I addressed on my blog. I think you made a very good point about efficiency and how people will still go to the radio, broadcasts, and the newspaper to get a boiled down version, I agree. Regular citizens will not sit and sift through tweets to get all the facts, though the tweets do help in the bigger picture. I think these types of sites are great resources, though not sole sources.
I agree with what you talked about in your history class. History would be boring without others opinions. A whole picture does need more than one voice. I hardly keep up with the news so tweets are very helpful to me. i like to know what's going on but i'm lazy.
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