I learned long ago not to feed the trolls -- not even when they happen to be columnists in prominent trade publications like AdAge -- but this guy seems so angry about my post calling Twitter the new CNN that I figured a quick reply was in order.
It's true, as Simon Dumenco at Ad Age argues, Twitter didn't break the news.
But, Twitter isn't a living sentient being, it's just a conduit for information. That would be like saying "TV" broke the story.
Keith Urbahn did.
He got the tip from a TV news producer. But he made it public first.
In the old days, those kinds of tips maybe would have been passed along from newsroom to newsroom on the informal gossip network while everybody waited for the official confirmation.
But Urbahn posted it immediately, along with two or three followups saying he wasn't SURE the news was true.
The point is, Twitter gives normal people access to the newsroom gossip that previously remained private. That's a huge change in how information is disseminated.
Why is Simon Dumenco so angry about my calling attention to this?
I have no idea, but I have a theory, and it comes down to a different point of view about "news."
News is something that happens in the real world.
That's it. Events happen. They are waiting to be uncovered.
Journalists add value in many different ways. Some are good at discovering events that happened but that somebody wants to keep private. That's breaking news. It's hard work. It takes connections, smarts, and persistence. SAI does it a lot.
When some random guy posts an unconfirmed rumor on Twitter and it turns out to be true, that seems to undercut the value of the old-fashioned grunt work necessary to break real news. So reporters scream and cry and call attention to the fact that real news takes real reporters -- like in this case, the TV person who got the news in the first place.
But where did that TV reporter get the information from? Why was he supposed to wait on it? What "confirmation" was he waiting for -- a press release? The official scripted presidential announcement?
Is that "real" reporting? Or is that transcription?
Nobody is suggesting that Twitter will replace journalists or that anybody should rely exclusively on Twitter as a news source -- that would be like getting all your news about the first Gulf War from CNN. But yesterday's events should make it clear to everybody that it's now an essential news resource.
If you're worried about that, go break some news.
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See Also:
- This Guy Live-Tweeted The Bin Laden Raid Yesterday Without Knowing It
- Twitter Just Had Its CNN Moment
- The Most Interesting Tweets About Osama Bin Laden's Death
If A Rumor Turns Out To Be True, Is It News?
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