Twitter is a communication tool, not an information source
If you’re on the digital airwaves at all these days, you’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Twitter and particularly how people are starting to turn to it for bleeding edge news reporting. (I covered the real-time news aspect of Twitter previously.) What most pundits and even reporters are missing in this fray is that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information, and they should treat it as such in their reporting.
The distinction is an important one, and it’s growing increasingly relevant. In the aftermath of the coverage of Michael Jackson’s untimely death, the TechCrunch blowhards bellyached about how the mainstream media didn’t recognize Twitter’s role in the story coverage. Author Robin Wauters cites the Chicago Tribune’s coverage:
Gossip site TMZ.com, owned by Time Warner, was out in front with Jackson news and digital-era pipelines spread the word, as has happened before with other major celebrity news stories. But it was old media stalwarts that did the heavy lifting, with giants such as The Associated Press and the Web site of the L.A. Times, sister paper of the Chicago Tribune, reporting the fastest, most credible information on the emergency call for paramedics and ultimately his death.
and she complains that
Chest-beating over old media doing the “heavy lifting” for blogs and Twitter, and being faster in reporting information than those new media when it was exactly the other way around is beyond ridiculous.
Wauters asserts that Twitter and TMZ did all the “heavy lifting”, but let’s be totally clear here: Twitter didn’t do anything at all. Twitter only facilitated communication between humans; in this case it enabled the distribution of links to the TMZ story. Twitter doesn’t have a news room, and they don’t have writers. Twitter is a pipe, a utility, a tool; it is not a source, so stop treating it as such.
Countless news stories are spread every day over email, blogs, message boards, cell phones, fax machine, or even good old word-of-mouth, but do we need to recognize the role of those tools in news coverage? ”I just heard the news, thank you cell phones for giving me this news!” Do we believe these tools should get recognition equal to the actual sources of news that created the stories being passed along them? Now that’s ridiculous. Just because the communication tool is new doesn’t mean it is anything more than a tool. TechCrunch, please get over yourselves and stop promoting Web 2.0 for the sake of it.
Twitter is pretty sure Jeff Goldblum is dead
Jeff Goldblum, for one, can probably vouch for how little heavy lifting Twitter actually does:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c |
| Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed | |
TMZ alone should get credit for having feet on the ground (of some sort) and for getting the story first. Stop thanking the messenger, and thank the writer of the message.
I replied to your Tweet about this post (heh), and I have to elaborate– while I do agree with your post for the most part, I also wanted to point out that during Santa Barbara’s recent Jesusita fire, Twitter became an invaluable source of key updates and emergency information. Yes, about half of it was merely linking to official news and county websites, but more often than not, we received updates via Twiter BEFORE those official sites were updated. People were out there, in the thick of it, watching, listening to scanners, speaking to their connections with emergency personnel, regaling us with firsthand experience of their own (or their friends’) evacuations, etc… and updating us accordingly.
Granted, this situation and usage of Twitter was probably the exception to the rule, but it was pretty awesome to witness, anyway. And shows that in some circumstances, Twitter CAN be used as more than a mere “communication facilitation” tool, despite its limitations.
I agree completely that the *information* you can get through Twitter can be extremely useful, but my point is that it’s still just a medium. You could have been getting those updates through a blog, an email list, a call list (popular at schools), or a message board somewhere, and if more public officials were Internet savvy, that would probably already be the case. Twitter is just a convenient new way for that information to be distributed.
Also, for actual emergencies, I *hope* that authorities would first turn to tools like the Emergency Broadcast System which, being on every TV and radio station, has a much better reach than Twitter.