Comments on: Twitter Becoming A Source, Not Just News

By: Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:01:52 +0000

I don’t see Twitter becoming a “source” anytime soon, or ever. It’s just a service that happens to be very “now” and probably won’t have the same cache that it has today. It will eventually disappear from the consciousness of the mass media the same way Second Life and now Facebook have. “Shiny object syndrome”, right? Or does that only apply to gadgets?

By: Dave Fleet

Dave Fleet — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:58:48 +0000

Joe, I think we’re saying the same thing in different ways. In the Globe and Mail excerpt I cited, for example, the reporter quoted something a person had said on Twitter.

You’re right – Twitter is an assembly of voices. However, it provides an extra outlet for those voices to be heard and that’s how some journalists are using it.

By: Joseph Thornley

Joseph Thornley — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:52:46 +0000

Dave, Twitter is nothing more than an assembly of individual voices. I can’t see it ever being credited as a source. Any journalist worth her salt is going to look for the identity of the person who tweeted and attribute it to that person.

I think about the tweets I saw the day the Russia Georgia war broke out. If you simply followed the Twitter stream you’d hear that Russian invaded Georgia. But you would be totally unaware of Georgia’s earlier military action in the separatist regions. Most of this chatter was from Twitterers located in North America – the other side of the world from where the action was actually taking place. Anyone relying on these reports had better look at the identity of the twitterer to see if they are actually reporting what they saw or simply relaying what they heard.

No, twitter won’t become a news source. The people who tweet will continue to be the sources. But, of course, it becomes incredibly easy for someone who actually has seen something happen to report on it.