Much debate over the past couple of days on what it means for mainstream news (whatever that is now) that, as Jemima Kiss puts it, "rumour has it that Twitter 'beat' even the US Geological Survey in reporting the earthquakes in China".
Mathew initially suggested that Twitter may have become "the first draft of history" and then goes on, a day later, to clarify that this is a long, long way from saying Twitter is killing traditional media. Indeed.
I'd suggest thinking about the impact of Twitter on mainstream/traditional/whatever media in this way.
Q: what problems does a news company solve when it puts journalists into the field, sets up expensive international bureaux or otherwise goes about gathering the news from around the world?
A: it tells its readers/viewers/PSKATA what's going on; it tells them what it means; and it validates that the story is true.
Twitter is yet another possible shortcut to the first of these solutions. Currently it has negligible impact on the second or third.
If something's going on in China, no-one needs to wait until the BBC or even the US Geological Survey finds out. The guys in China that it's happening to are going to tell us. Which means that...sure, we'd like a news source that we trust to confirm that any given news story is real (or the possibilities for Twitterers around the world to yank our collective chain become unmanageable). And we still need a guide as to what it means. But Twitter is another - even faster - way in which we don't necessarily need news reporters to just tell us that something's going on somewhere. By the time they know, we know.
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