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www.ethanzuckerman.com/...he-news-cycle-perfect-together - Cached - Annotated View

Amr Gharbeia's personal annotations on this page

gharbeia
Gharbeia bookmarked on 2009-06-28 Twitter Journalism MichaelJackson EthanZuckerman

  • What’s really interesting to me is the extent to which news reporters seem to have chosen Twitter as the go-to source for reactions to news events. It makes sense - there’s a premium in the news business on speed, on having a story faster than anyone else does, so the need for the quick quote makes Google hours to slow to help you. And the 140 character limit guarantees that whoever you quote will be pithy and limited to a single soundbite.


    This, in turn, also increases the chance that you’ll be wrong. A proper quote from me would probably have been something like: “The search string ‘Michael Jackson’ is getting intense interest on Twitter at the moment, showing up in between 13-20% of tweets. It’s unlikely this level of intensity will continue through the night, but at the moment, it exceeds the intensity I’ve seen on Twitter during slower-breaking stories like #swineflu, #pman and #IranElection.” That, unfortunately, is 337 characters - far too long for anyone to read anymore. And a clarification in the form of a blogpost? That’s so 2006.

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Jun 2009, by Amr Gharbeia.

  • 28 Jun 09
    gharbeia
    Amr Gharbeia

    Twitter Journalism MichaelJackson EthanZuckerman

    • What’s really interesting to me is the extent to which news reporters seem to have chosen Twitter as the go-to source for reactions to news events. It makes sense - there’s a premium in the news business on speed, on having a story faster than anyone else does, so the need for the quick quote makes Google hours to slow to help you. And the 140 character limit guarantees that whoever you quote will be pithy and limited to a single soundbite.


      This, in turn, also increases the chance that you’ll be wrong. A proper quote from me would probably have been something like: “The search string ‘Michael Jackson’ is getting intense interest on Twitter at the moment, showing up in between 13-20% of tweets. It’s unlikely this level of intensity will continue through the night, but at the moment, it exceeds the intensity I’ve seen on Twitter during slower-breaking stories like #swineflu, #pman and #IranElection.” That, unfortunately, is 337 characters - far too long for anyone to read anymore. And a clarification in the form of a blogpost? That’s so 2006.