How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? If it is about breaking news, immediacy and the linking to source material to establish fact then 140 characters does pretty well.
Twitter is a free social messaging service for staying connected in real-time that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets which are limited to 140 characters from either a mobile phone or a computer. Sounds easy - well it is - insanely so and although the idea of broadcasting messages of your every movement to the world does at first seem mad it's an incredibly useful tool.
For a reporter that regularly covers a beat twitter is fabously good for networking. Journalists need people to tell them stuff and twitter allows reporters to connect with their community. Journalist Pat Kane describes it as a "folksonomy of knowledge on the move" and a tool that acts as an “expertise archive that enriches and adds to the toolbox of the traditional journalist”. A few years ago we called this desk research.
Being real time and mobile twitter acts as an early warning system for breaking news stories. In the chaos of Mumbai during the terrorist attack twitter gave a sense of what was happening on the ground with more analytical coverage through blogs and traditional news media following later. Journalists monitoring twitter at the time of the Hudson plane crash were viewing the picture of the downed plane before the wire agencies had uploaded a shot. Photographs, audio and live video from the scene and linked through twitter gave these stories a speed and intimacy not possible before.
In Kenya, a country with poor broadband penetration, twitter was used by journalists to share information during the elections. With one text they could send a message to their twitter network, facebook profile and an update to their blog, offering an effective way to share information in real time to a large group of people.
Jon Gripton, Online Editor for Sky News calls twitter a “peoples wire agency” that is of growing importance in news gathering. Perhaps the reason why Sky News has appointed Ruth Barnett as its first twitter correspondent. It allows journalism to break away from the “churnalism” that consumes much of the media today and offers an alternate way for a news organisations to source original content.
Twitter is popular not just because it allows journalists to crowdsource with thousands of people or because it's a fun way of amassing followers and inflating egos. It also gives reporters a chance to create a new system of reporting. In the past, journalists were confined to their words and research methods, all dictated by traditional routines. Now they can create new strategies, use different tools, brand themselves differently, and propose new ideas. Twitter has given them hope and direction to do this because it has given them a public forum in which to loudly speak their ideas.
With tools that allow content to be reported and shared so easily news isn't dying, it's thriving. Google makes news ubiquitous and journalists need to use tools like twitter to help source stories and drive people to what is more scarce - authority.
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