Tuesday, August 05, 2008

The importance of the nine minutes

An interesting post from Chris O'Brien as to whether Twitter is the future of the newsroom.

He looks at its impact following the minor earth tremors in Los Angeles last week

On Twitter's blog, co-founder Biz Stone discussed the notion that Twitter was becoming the new newswire, noting the first tweet came nine minutes before the Associated Press pushed out its first story on the quake


But he asks do those nine minutes really matter?

This has always been a fundamental, unanswerable question, whether we're talking about TV news and which cable station has a 30 second head start on a story, or which wire service is first with new financial news


The problem ,as he identifies, is the sheer volume,sorting the relevent from the rubbish ,the verification and what makes it a news story.

There was a lot of talk about the twittering of the Uk earthquake earlier in the year.I was inclined to think at the time that the media made far too much of a story that really was a non event and Twitter and to a larger extent the social newtworking sites made this into a news story.The fact that the BBC didn't interupt its coverage to bring us the story was admirable.

No comments: