Putting the words Twitter and journalism into the same sentence seems to provoke a spasm from professional journalists.
At a “curated unconference” hosted by Reuters Thomson in London, the value of Twitter in journalism was once again under scrutiny.
The report in The Guardian suggests there was a deep-seated level of unease in talking about Twitter as journalism.
The head of the BBC’s global news division, Richard Sambrook, argued:
Twitter is good at gossip, promoting people’s interest, and entertaining, but it is also good in some news-related fields. It isn’t journalism, but it is good in transporting eyewitness pictures and live tweets, as it is in providing links to sites of interest.
And Jeremy Gaunt from Reuters also looked at Twitter from the perspective of a professional journalist:
Twitter is not an alternative to journalism. The role of the journalist changes from a gatekeeper of information to a gatewatcher. In case of an event or a catastrophe it might be his role to curate the live stream of Twitter and social media platforms. So he is still fact-checking.
While both of these are valid points, I would suggest that they miss the point. The argument “Twitter isn’t journalism” reminds me of the way journalists used to say “blogging isn’t journalism.”
The important point to note is that Twitter is a communications platform, much like the magazine is. A magazine may or may not be a platform for news and information. Similarly, Twitter is a platform on which journalism is taking place – it is just happening the way journalism has taken place in the past.
Twitter provides a platform for distributed journalism, where the value lies not in the individual tweet, but the combined and networked nature of the platform.
I have called this ambient journalism in an academic paper I presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September, and due to be published next year.
Rather than arguing about whether Twitter is or isn’t journalism, we should shift the conversation to understanding the journalism taking place on this platform and its relationship to established journalism norms and practices.
Let’s avoid a rerun of the “blogging isn’t journalism” debate.
So much of this angst over what is and is not journalism is just self-indulgent navel gazing. Is Fox news “journalism”? Is MSNBC? Is Lou Dobbs a journalist? Or Rachel Madow? The major outlets have gone far down the path of substituting opinion for reporting and its funny to see them denouncing new forms of media and communication even as they scramble to look cool by adopting them. Blogs and Twitter serve a vital function…. they keep the “real” journalists honest by catching them in their (to be generous) careless fact checking.
Seems that one commits journalism when one discovers and artifact or an idea, learns more about the truth of it, then shares the idea with a wider audience. Using twitter to do this is perfectly acceptable as is using Google, texting, email, camera, calling or meeting someone.
To be fair Alf I wasn’t reheating the Blogging/Twitter/Social Media isnt journalism debate. I was actually asking if Twitter could go further and curate journalism better – as structures like lists start to appear. Currently it is, of course, a platform and provides an information stream. But as real time public dialogue establishes itself at the heart of social media, and at the heart of public debate we need to find ways to support verification, reflection, analysis, context etc. As one person at the unconference put it – a call for “slow journalism” alongside (not instead of) and supporting the accelerated news cycle that real time dialogue like Twitter provides.
[...] phone to read and tweet about anything you want to talk about. However, I have read an article “,Why Journalist are uneasy talking about Twitter as journalism,” which Alfred Hermida discussed about a new terms called “ambient journalism” that twitter [...]
[...] is a medium and cannot be considered as a whole, writes Alfred Hermida, who’s worried that we’re about to rehash the old argument about whether a new medium “is journalism.” [...]
[...] is a medium and cannot be considered as a whole, writes Alfred Hermida, who’s worried that we’re about to rehash the old argument about whether a new medium “is [...]