Twitter Essay: The New York Twitter? Yes and No.

This quarter was my first time working with twitter and learning what it has been doing to the world of journalism. Before my introduction into the tool, I was already so used to Facebook that Twitter did not seem like that hard of an application to figure out how to use. I had a lot of complications with it at first, and quite honestly was not too big of a fan. However, over the course of learning about it more and working with it a lot, I have developed a respect for Twitter and would now agree that it holds something special in the future of journalism.

From what I have learned about it, Twitter is a social networking tool focused on allowing people to update each other with their lives on a second to second basis. Its technology is simple, being based around status updates to which can only contain 140 characters or less. The other part of the Twitter equation is following; people can follow each other without mutual consent (meaning that if you want to follow someone they do not have to agree to let you follow them), and get notified whenever someone they are following has published a new update. This equation can be confusing because those who use twitter (the Twitter community now includes businesses, artists, journalists, and news organizations as well) tend to update plenty of times each day, and if you are following a plethera of people, your twitter account will recieve hundreds to thousands of new updates on a daily basis. However, I noticed that once I got used to using the application, it proved to be useful in a couple major ways to the possible future of journalism.

As far as the future of news is concerned, Twitter will be a very successfull tool in that it allows people from anywhere in the world to update others on what is going on at that exact moment. What does this imply? Breaking News will now almost completely be covered by Twitter alone. If an earthquake happens somewhere halfway around the world, Twitter feeds of that incident will come out even before that information is registered in geological databases, which is long before any news organization would get that information out to the public. At this point in time, there are not enough people using Twitter, so the argument cannot be made that Twitter is the main news medium for reporting breaking news all around the world. However, it is probably safe to assume that at some point in the future, Twitter will have become popular enough so that enough people are tweeting around the world that almost any story that would normally be covered by news organizations are being covered by the citizens themselves! One might think that is the worst news that any journalist could here, because if there are no stories like that to report, and if citizens are already informed before reporters even make it to the scene, how will journalists even be around in the future? However, in my mind, the fact that Twitter is eventually going to take over breaking news is probably the best news a journalist could hear. Why? Because now journalists have a real opportunity to show their professionalism. I mean this because real journalism, in my mind, is not simply reporting what is going on: it is moreso the act of digging deep into a story, getting an interview nobody else could get; squeezing information out of sources that nobody else could get, and finally, using skills in writing or film-making to get that story out to the world. Journalists are authors with a hint of practicality- they are there to write compelling stories that have to do with what is really going on around us; they are not there to explain to us that something happened, but are rather telling us the significance of what happened. With a good method to charge people for the stories they write, journalists could even be better off now than they were before. News organizations can play into this by recruiting journalists in a similar way that any business hires their employees. So Twitter will essentially change the entire business model for journalism.

I sat in on a skype interview the other day with David Cohn of “Spot.us,” who gave me a great picture as to another way Twitter is shaping the new world of journalism. He shared a story about how he had to interview somebody about ten minutes after he found out that he would be doing an interview with them. He used Twitter to ask people what questions they would like to have answered, and within a matter of five minutes he had several Tweets with questions to ask his source. Twitter will be a great tool for offering journalists tips as far as things to write about or even directions to go with a story. It is in this way that Twitter will effectively connect the journalist with citizens.