Twitter does not have many users in Abbottabad in Pakistan, where Facebook is apparently more the social platform of choice. But it has enough to break the first sounds of gunfire in the fight which was to eventually lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. Sohaib Athar, with his @ReallyVirtual Twitter handle, is not the future of news he is the present of news. Mainstream media has in truth never really lived where events actually happen, unless it is in the centers of power where information control is practiced. So government, finance, entertainment and sports make it easier for news organisations to live where the news breaks.( Or indeed Royalty). Some organisations - Reuters, the AP, CNN, the BBC - have enough resource to provide a reasonable impression of living where news breaks, but for the rest, the game has been to assemble analysis, context, personality and subsidiary facts around the core of breaking news and to package it into a business.
The rise of the realtime social web has changed everything. The network effect now means that people with connectivity and curiosity really do live where news breaks. They are not journalists or reporters, but they are interested in finding out what they have heard or seen, as Sohaib Athar was yesterday. And the best way to get an answer is bot to ask and to tell. None of this is new, all of it is obvious, and all of it can be supported by evidence. When news breaks now, people want to both participate and talk about it, as they did even late on a Sunday evening when President Obama officially confirmed what had been alive on Twitter for some time.
There is far more real time information now about how news is both broken, passed around, read, watched, commented on and analysed than at any point in history. Huge tides of data roll through the servers of every platform and every news site and every IP address every day. What this data demonstrates is that stories are most engaging when they are happening, and that the level of interest and engagement for big stories is only increased when they are supplemented with context, new facts and conversation also in real time. I remember only a couple of years ago sitting in meetings at the Guardian where there was still real anxiety as to whether breaking news and covering live events was really the right thing for a news organisation which ‘was not a breaking news organisation’ to do. It was an understandable reaction to the terrifying prospect of being on 24 hours a day, engaging with stories at lighter depth and at greater speed than had previously been the case. This now seems an incredibly arcane discussion to have had.
If you are related to the world of news, as opposed to the world of analysis, if you don’t have a strategy for live stories and reporting, then you have a very limited future. If you wish to have credibility even in the world of analysis and have no presence in the breaking news conversation then I would strongly argue that over time this is going to dramatically and adversely affect your brand. My desire to read longer form articles by great journalists resides in me being familiar with their work already or having it recommended to me by people I trust. This is a habit formed entirely in the world of print and documentary formats, because there were no other options for me when I was growing up and becoming interested in the world. New audiences now assess quality through immediacy and relevance. You fail to register a story when it breaks, you lose an opportunity. You don’t have a sentient observer able to share immediate thoughts on the subject on a platform or network I belong to, you also lose. You are not available to be a trusted sounding or thinking post when big things happen, you won’t get them back to read or watch your insights three days later.
Live is not ‘yet another thing’ for a working journalist to understand , it is the great journalistic challenge of our time. The skill involved in providing real time valuable information for audiences around stories as they happen is crucial to being a credible journalist and a resilient news organisation. For those who question whether this kind of journalism can be valuable or high quality, there are three examples I can immediately think of to show them which rebuts the idea (if anybody realy still holds it) that working in real time degrades good journalism.
First, there is my former colleague Andrew Sparrow, at the Guardian. When we hired him, several years ago, what was striking about him was not his background, (he was a good lobby journalist who had worked for print publications) but that he was interested in the process of political reporting. He was something of a scholar on the issue of Parliamentary reporting and said he wanted to move online because he saw that political reporting and the internet were highly compatible but not being used particularly well. His meticulous live blogging of events such as the Chilcott Inquiry created a form of news reporting which had both the depth and context it was hard to cram into one space constrained article. This year at the British Press Awards, Andy was named political reporter of the year. This in an election year, where Labour lost power in the most unpredictable election for a decade, a coalition government stumbled into power and politics became momentarily dramatic. This is not just a reward for really sparkling journalism, but the validation of techniques now open to journalists such as liveblogging . To be adding context and knowledge to real time events, was the best way to report the election.
Secondly, I would point to the incredible work of Greg Mitchell over at The Nation. Mitchell has blogged every day of the Wikileaks story since it broke in November. Sometimes his posts are cursory and short, sometimes they are detailed and lengthy. But they are always there. It is interesting that neither the New York Times, or The Guardian come to that, have provided the kind of excellent meta coverage that Mitchell has managed. His daily beat on the story demonstrates what journalists are for in the world of real time communications and complexity. Journalists are there to spend time with stories and sources which are important but not always visible. Wikileaks will continue to unfold as a story over months and possibly years, yet no news outlets are covering it in the way Mitchell is ; he is the Wikileaks bar which is always open.
And last but not least, there is the much talked about work of Andy Carvin, or @acarvin as most of us know him as the head of social media strategy at NPR, Andy’s tweeting about the Arab Spring from an aggregational and curatorial perspective has actually made him on e of the most valuable available news resources on this story. His work has really set out a new template for a role as yet unspecified in news organisations and accidental to his duties at NPR. Carvin’s skill is in being timely, and diligent. He tweeted up to 500 times a day at the height of the Egyptian revolution, yet he never left Washington. Of course some would argue this is not ‘proper reporting’ although fewer and fewer people would actually contest that it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the highest quality reporting. But every news organisation has desk editors don’t they? And desk editors follow stories through back channels, conversations, reading, watching and listening to material relevat to their field. Most desk editors will be totally engaged on every story of this magnitude to the same kind of sleepless depth as Andy Carvin, yet almost no desk editors expose this work in the way Carvin does. Why not? The job of arranging and cutting stories to length, commissioning the right headline, sitting in meetings to hear how the rest of the bulletin or newspaper is being put together will all take less and less time in the future, or cease completely. The necessity to find and cultivate sources outside your own correspondent network will only increase. I would be as motivated to buy or spend time with a news brand which had identifiable editors active in their areas of expertise, as I would with reporters. Andy Carvin’s job has baffled many news people; he works for NPR but his public service journalism is being done on an entirely different network. But it is very clear to me that he is absolutely a model of a 21st century ‘news editor’ but one tied to a story or theme, not a format.
Every news room will have to remake itself around the principle of being reactive in real time. Every page or story that every news organisation distributes will eventually show some way of flagging if the page is active or archived, if the conversation is alive and well or over and done with. Every reporter and editor will develop a real time presence in some form, which makes them available to the social web. When I say ‘will’ I of course don’t mean that literally . I think many of them won’t, but eventually they will be replaced by ones who do. The most interesting experiment in this area by mainstream media is currently Al Jazeera’s ‘Stream’ . even here though, the fluidity of topics and conversations is restricted by format.
For those who want to write or produce at length and in isolation from the real-time web, then this will continue, magazines, documentaries, books and films will continue to have a life independent of ‘the stream’.And there is at the moment value in this resource intensive research and longer form journalism. It is a kind of slow journalism which underwrites the real time events. However, in terms of how to connect it to the real world and find audiences, it needs integrating more rigorously into this new world which transcends schedules or institutions.
Recently the AP’s interactive news guru Jonathan Stray posted a very thought provoking piece on news search on his blog. The whole post is really worth reading and absorbing, but critically it identifies the idea that reporting information needs to transcend current formats, and be highly aggregational and searchable. And live. Imagining how a new type of story would be structured he says:
A text story about refugees due to war and other catastrophes is an obvious introduction, especially if it includes maps and other multimedia. And that would typically be the end of the story by today’s conventions. But we can do deeper. The International Organization for Migration maintains detailed statistics on the topic. We could plot that data, make it searchable and linkable. Now we’re at about the level of a good news app today. Let’s go further by making it live, not a visualization of a data set but a visualization of a data feed, an automatically updating information resource that is by definition evergreen. And then let’s pull in all of the good stories concerning migration, whether or not our own newsroom wrote them.
Even in the time I have been writing this post, Giga Om took a brief look at this compressed cycle where news breaks at the speed of thought concluding, not unreasonably that once a new news cycle is established in requires new tools and ways of thinking to respond to it.
The live updating stream of thought and reaction is here to stay, and it will become more prevalent rather than less. If they haven’t already news businesses will need to prepare their journalists, their technologies and their interfaces to reflect this new world. It is not about ‘being first at the cost of being right’, it is about being there, or not .
Like this:
8 bloggers like this post.
By the time President Barack Obama appeared from the East Room of the White House at 11:35 Sunday night to give a historic speech announcing that U.S. forces in Pakistan had killed Osama bin Laden, the news had been viral for an hour. TV news coverage was wall-to-wall. Newspaper and wire reporters were in overdrive [...]
While people debated whether Web sites like Twitter were important in organizing protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Andy Carvin was organizing information about the protests in an innovative way.
Mr. Carvin’s Twitter account was transformed into a personal news wire about Egypt and was widely praised in news media circles. By seeking out the voices of sources in Egypt and sharing them almost in real time on a social networking site, he “provided a hint of what news can look like in an increasingly networked media environment,” the Nieman Journalism Lab wrote in a blog post on Friday.
For people who wanted to take the minute-by-minute pulse of a protest, Mr. Carvin’s account was a suitable starting point.
His day job is at NPR, where he is a senior strategist who specializes in digital media. When protests began to take place in Tunisia, a country he had traveled through extensively, he collected people’s Twitter and Facebook messages, videos, and links on a Web site called Storify.
When attention turned to Egypt, he decided to use Twitter to the same effect. A number of his 400-some posts a day, written from an office in Washington or on one of his cellphones, consisted of unconfirmed comments from protesters or sympathizers, preceded by a question, “Source?” He was fact-checking in full view, something that the Web seemingly encourages.
“Some people have called this type of reporting as curation, as if it’s something totally new,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Well, Twitter might be relatively new, but the notion of journalists gathering, analyzing and disseminating relevant information isn’t new at all. I see that as curation as well.”
Some of the 20,800 people who follow Mr. Carvin on Twitter helped out by translating comments and researching questions.
His audience on Twitter is far smaller than the audience for NPR’s newscasts. But that audience included many fellow journalists, who frequently amplified what Mr. Carvin was sharing and confirming. He said that he helped NPR producers arrange interviews and identify the connections between protesters.
Mr. Carvin also suggested that people who appreciated his work could donate to their local NPR station, and by the looks of the replies on Twitter, dozens of people did.
Mr. Carvin now wants to meet his online sources in person. As his Twitter account was overwhelmed Friday evening by the celebratory comments of Egyptians, he wrote, “I must go to Tunisia and Egypt.”
As a platform, Twitter has become a tremendously useful tool for disseminating information, sometimes being essential in circumventing restrictions on free speech. Its democratic nature makes it possible for any piece of information to be distributed. And as Twitter is used more and more as a news source, it is also becoming the go-to source for information on breaking news. The first news of Osama bin Laden's death, to give a recent example, was first posted on Twitter.
What can be a problem is that Twitter does not have a mechanism to verify the veracity of the information transmitted on it. There is no editorial framework, which makes it possible for any information - or disinformation - to take off and become a trend.
For this reason, AdAge's Simon Dumenco suggested that Twitter create a way to direct its users to most reliable sources of information. In his view, a community of some kind could be tasked with evaluating sources according to their importance, which would make it easier for users to identify trustworthy information.
Poynter's Latoya Peterson does not share Dumenco's views on what direction Twitter should be developed. She argued against the practice of using human intermediaries to choose reliable sources, as she saw it as an old-media way of managing a new-media platform. Peterson pointed out that as a platform, Twitter is used for several reasons: many use it for connections and entertainment, and are probably not interested in trustworthiness primarily. Moreover, the idea of moderating a platform seems problematic to Peterson: for example, did the first on-location information from the Arab uprisings come from "reliable sources," she asked.
Peterson quoted Derrick Ashongh, host of Al Jazeera's recently launched social media show The Stream, as saying that the traditional media follows a top-down model, in which a group of people decide what is relevant news. With free dissemination of information, it is now possible for just about anyone to choose and relay information - to curate.
Twitter can be an immensely useful tool, and people are still finding new functions for it. The trend of curating news based on Twitter content - exemplified by the recent launch of Storify to the public - is a good example of this. On its own, Twitter is only an unrestricted storehouse for information, but its nature is also one of its main assets.
The information on Twitter is undoubtedly best used when someone handpicks the most useful and reliable material. This, naturally, requires a high level of media literacy. But having such a system integrated into Twitter might undermine "less-trustworthy" sources' ability to get their voices heard. Curating is a good example of how vetting information on Twitter can be done outside the platform, instead of interfering with its intrinsic democratic nature.
Mar 26 2011
It’s impossible to build a computer system that helps people find or filter information without at some point making editorial judgements. That’s because search and collaborative filtering algorithms embody human judgement about what is important to know. I’ve been pointing this out for years, and it seems particularly relevant to the journalism profession today as it grapples with the digital medium. It’s this observation which is the bridge between the front page and the search results page, and it suggests a new generation of digital news products that are far more useful than just online translations of a newspaper.
It’s easy to understand where human judgement enters into information filtering algorithms, if you think about how such things are built. At some point a programmer writes some code for, say, a search engine, and tests it by looking at the output on a variety of different queries. Are the results good? In what way do they fall short of the social goals of the software? How should the code be changed? It’s not possible to write a search engine without a strong concept of what “good” results are, and that is an editorial judgement.
I bring this up now for two reasons. One is an ongoing, active debate over “news applications” — small programs designed with journalistic intent — and their role in journalism. Meanwhile, for several years Google’s public language has been slowly shifting from “our search results are objective” to “our search results represent our opinion.” The transition seems to have been completed a few weeks ago, when Matt Cutts spoke to Wired about Google’s new page ranking algorithm:
In some sense when people come to Google, that’s exactly what they’re asking for — our editorial judgment. They’re expressed via algorithms. When someone comes to Google, the only way to be neutral is either to randomize the links or to do it alphabetically.
There it is, from the mouth of the bot. “Our editorial judgment” is “expressed via algorithms.” Google is saying that they have and employ editorial judgement, and that they write algorithms to embody it. They use algorithms instead of hand-curated lists of links, which was Yahoo’s failed web navigation strategy of the late 1990s, because manual curation doesn’t scale to whole-web sizes and can’t be personalized. Yet hand selection of articles is what human editors do every day in assembling the front page. It is valuable, but can’t fulfill every need.
Informing people takes more than reporting
Like a web search engine, journalism is about getting people the accurate information they need or want. But professional journalism is built upon pre-digital institutions and economic models, and newsrooms are geared around content creation, not getting people information. The distinction is important, and journalism’s lack of attention to information filtering and organization seems like a big omission, an omission that explains why technology companies have become powerful players in news.I don’t mean to suggest that going out and getting the story — aka “reporting” — isn’t important. Obviously, someone has to provide the original report that then ricochets through the web via social media, links, and endless reblogging. Further, there is evidence that very few people do original reporting. Last year I counted the percentage of news outlets did their own reporting on one big story, and found that only 13 of 121 stories listed on Google News did not simply copy information found elsewhere. A contemporaneous Pew study of the news ecosystem of Baltimore found that most reporting was still done by print newspapers, with very little contributed by “new media,” though this study has been criticized for a number of potentially serious category problems. I’ve also repeatedly experienced the power that a single original report can have, as when I made a few phone calls to discover that Jurgen Habermas is not on Twitter, or worked with AP colleagues to get the first confirmation from network operators that Egypt had dropped off the internet. Working in a newsroom, obsessively watching the news propagate through the web, I see this every day: it’s amazing how few people actually pump original reports into the ecosystem.
But reporting isn’t everything. It’s not nearly enough. Reporting is just one part of ensuring that important public information is available, findable, and known. This is where journalism can learn something from search engines, because I suspect what we really want is a hybrid of human and algorithmic judgement.
As conceived in the pre-digital era, news is a non-personalized, non-interactive stream of updates about a small number of local or global stories. The first and most obvious departure from this model would be the ability to search within a news product for particular stories of interest. But the search function on most news websites is terrible, and mostly fails at the core task of helping people find the best stories about a topic of interest. If you doubt this, try going to your favorite news site and searching for that good story that you read there last month. Partially this is technical neglect. But at root this problem is about newsroom culture: the primary product is seen to be getting the news out, not helping people find what is there. (Also, professional journalism is really bad at linking between stories, and most news orgs don’t do fine-grained tracking of social sharing of their content, which are two of primary signals that search engines use to determine which articles are the most relevant.)
Story-specific news applications
We are seeing signs of a new kind of hybrid journalism that is as much about software as it is about about reporting. It’s still difficult to put names to what is happening, but terms like “news application” are emerging. There has been much recent discussion of the news app, including a session at the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in February, and landmark posts on the topic at Poynter and NiemanLab. Good examples of the genre include ProPublica’s dialysis facility locator, which combines investigative reporting with a search engine built on top of government data, and the Los Angeles Time’s real-time crime map, which plots LAPD data across multiple precincts and automatically detects statistically significant spikes. Both can be thought of as story-specific search engines, optimized for particular editorial purposes.Yet the news apps of today are just toes in the water. It is no disrespect to all of the talented people currently working in the field say this, because we are at the beginning of something very big. One common thread in recent discussion of news apps has been a certain disappointment at the slow rate of adoption of the journalist-programmer paradigm throughout the industry. Indeed, with Matt Waite’s layoff from Politifact, despite a Pulitzer Prize for his work, some people are wondering if there’s any future at all in the form. My response is that we haven’t even begun to see the full potential of software combined with journalism. We are under-selling the news app because we are under-imagining it.
I want to apply search engine technology to tell stories. “Story” might not even be the right metaphor, because the experience I envision is interactive and non-linear, adapting to the user’s level of knowledge and interest, worth return visits and handy in varied circumstances. I don’t want a topic page, I want a topic app. Suppose I’m interested in — or I have been directed via headline to — the subject of refugees and internal migration. A text story about refugees due to war and other catastrophes is an obvious introduction, especially if it includes maps and other multimedia. And that would typically be the end of the story by today’s conventions. But we can do deeper. The International Organization for Migration maintains detailed statistics on the topic. We could plot that data, make it searchable and linkable. Now we’re at about the level of a good news app today. Let’s go further by making it live, not a visualization of a data set but a visualization of a data feed, an automatically updating information resource that is by definition evergreen. And then let’s pull in all of the good stories concerning migration, whether or not our own newsroom wrote them. (As a consumer, the reporting supply chain is not my problem, and I’ve argued before that news organizations need to do much more content syndication and sharing.) Let’s build a search engine on top of every last scrap of refugee-related content we can find. We could start with classic keyword search techniques, augment them by link analysis weighted toward sources we trust, and ingest and analyze the social streams of whichever communities deal with the issue. Then we can tune the whole system using our editorial-judgment-expressed-as-algorithms to serve up the most accurate and relevant content not only today, but every day in the future. Licensed content we can show within our product, and all else we can simply link to, but the search engine needs to be a complete index.
Rather than (always, only) writing stories, we should be trying to solve the problem of comprehensively informing the user on a particular topic. Web search is great, and we certainly need top-level “index everything” systems, but I’m thinking of more narrowly focussed projects. Choose a topic and start with traditional reporting, content creation, in-house explainers and multimedia stories. Then integrate a story-specific search engine that gathers together absolutely everything else that can be gathered on that topic, and applies whatever niche filtering, social curation, visualization, interaction and communication techniques are most appropriate. We can shape the algorithms to suit the subject. To really pull this off, such editorially-driven search engines need to be both live in the sense of automatically incorporating new material from external feeds, and comprehensive in the sense of being an interface to as much information on the topic as possible. Comprehensiveness will keep users coming back to your product and not someone else’s, and the idea of covering 100% of a story is itself powerful.
Other people’s content is content too
The brutal economics of online publishing dictate that we meet the needs of our users with as little paid staff time as possible. That drives the production process toward algorithms and outsourced content. This might mean indexing and linking to other people’s work, syndication deals that let a news site run content created by other people, or a blog network that bright people like to contribute to. It’s very hard for the culture of professional journalism to accept this idea, the idea that they should leverage other people’s work as far as they possibly can for as cheap as they can possibly get it, because many journalists and publishers feel burned by aggregation. But aggregation is incredibly useful, while the feelings and job descriptions of newsroom personnel are irrelevant to the consumer. As Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy put it, “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” and the idea that a single newsroom can produce the world’s best content on every topic is a damaging myth. That’s the fundamental value proposition of aggregation — all of the best stuff in one place. The word “best” represents editorial judgement in the classic sense, still a key part of a news organization’s brand, and that judgement can be embodied in whatever algorithms and social software are designed to do the aggregation. I realize that there are economic issues around getting paid for producing content, but that’s the sort of thing that needs to be solved by better content marketplaces, not lawsuits and walled gardens.None of this means that reporters shouldn’t produce regular stories on their beats, or that there aren’t plenty of topics which require lots of original reporting and original content. But asking who did the reporting or made the content misses the point. A really good news application/interactive story/editorial search engine should be able to teach us as much as we care to learn about the topic, regardless of the state of our previous knowledge, and no matter who originally created the most relevant material.
What I am suggesting comes down to this: maybe a digital news product isn’t a collection of stories, but a system for learning about the world. For that to happen, news applications are going to need to do a lot of algorithmically-enhanced organization of content originally created by other people. This idea is antithetical to current newsroom culture and the traditional structure of the journalism industry. But it also points the way to more useful digital news products: more integration of outside sources, better search and personalization, and story-specific news applications that embody whatever combination of original content, human curation, and editorial algorithms will best help the user to learn.
[Updated 27 March with more material on social signals in search, Bill Joy's maxim, and other good bits.]
[Updated 1 April with section titles.]
It's difficult for the columns on a Twitter client app to resonate with emotion, but late Sunday evening, as the news unfolded that U.S. special forces had killed al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, they certainly did.
There were, at the beginning and end of President Obama's speech announcing the victory, 4,000 "tweets" per second, an estimate that the company increased to over 5,000 on Monday morning. Twitter also elaborated further and said that it experienced its highest sustained rate of tweets ever, with an average of 3,000 tweets per second from 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m. Eastern time.
The meat of these tweets was an overwhelming, high-energy blend of excitement, confusion, speculation, and armchair observation; side-by-side in anyone's Twitter stream might have been a snarky post about Donald Trump wanting to see bin Laden's death certificate, alongside an elegiac 140 characters about where that user had been when the 9/11 attacks took place. There were many retweets of the message that started it all, from Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Then, maybe, there was a summary of what was being said on CNN. Television news reports--or live streams of them online--were still on.
Some say Twitter's become a replacement for traditional news. Well, it's obviously conditioned many people to believe they're entitled to an unprecedented flood of immediate news whenever they want it. But a thirst for immediate and fast-updating news long predates Twitter, and conversely, what Sunday's events really tell us is that responsible handling of the raw breaking news is more important than ever.
When September 11 happened, I was a senior in high school about a 90-minute drive from New York City. The school called a fire drill to get all students into one place in order to make a basic announcement, but we were then told to please go back to class and attempt to proceed with the day as normally as possible. This did not go over so well with a few students (myself included), who went straight to the computer lab and turned to the Internet to learn more.
This was a Web before Twitter, Facebook, or news aggregators; Google inserted hard-coded links to breaking news stories on its home page because its search results wouldn't be updated quickly enough. The problem was that news sites' Web servers had tanked; I couldn't load The New York Times, Washington Post, or Yahoo, and local news outlets didn't seem to have anything beyond the most basic information about what happened. The best we could get, at least for a nerve-wracking hour or two, was "open threads" on fringe political forums like Democratic Underground (on the left) and Free Republic (on the right), where the forums' dedicated political junkies were posting anything they'd heard, or anything they thought they'd heard.
It was messy, and some of it undoubtedly was inaccurate. When news sites' servers recovered, we switched right back to them.
These days, like so many people entrenched in the media and technology industries, my media consumption habits are fragmented by screen, by operating system, and by the neatly defined boundaries of each little app on my smartphone. On Sunday night I was sprawled on my living room couch watching AMC's crime drama "The Killing," and probably would've missed the entire news blitz about bin Laden's death--I was planning to go straight to sleep afterward--if I hadn't happened to pick up my iPhone during a commercial break and opened the browser to Google News. Already rising to the top ranks was the report that President Obama would be making an unexpected announcement about national security late on a Sunday night, which instantly made me wonder whether something terrible had happened.
The obvious next step: Check Twitter. Then the push notification for somebody's Foursquare check-in spoiled the surprise as I was opening the Twitter for iPhone app. Someone was announcing that she'd arrived at a bar, and appended "First cocktail of the post-Osama bin Laden era." Then the flood of tweets--elation, shock, snark, remembrance--took over the screen of my phone. There were some "facts" that were quickly disproven, like that bin Laden had been dead for a week (nope) and that he'd been killed directly in the Pakistani city of Islamabad (no, he was about 40 miles away). It grew so overwhelming that I turned to the comparatively civilized world of cable news, brash titles and pulsing animated tickers and all.
The town in Pakistan where it all happened.
(Credit: Google Maps)There's something extremely impressive about what can come out of the frenzy of noise that's stirred up whenever a major news event catches the eye of the Twittering hordes. Among the resources tweeted were links to live camera feeds of New York's Times Square as it filled with cheering crowds, Twitpics snapped of what was going on outside the White House or the former World Trade Center site, links to Google Earth satellite photographs of Abbottabad--the Pakistani town that housed the compound where bin Laden had been hiding--and the tweets from a Twitter user in that town who described hearing the helicopters used in the raid.
But the overload of news surrounding the speculation and finally the acknowledgment of bin Laden's death just underscored that unless you're the kind of person who craves a from-all-angles barrage of information, some of which will be dubious, getting your news straight from Twitter can be a stressful process, a display of figurative neon lights blinking out of control. These are the news fiends who want access to read and re-broadcast the true insiders, the Keith Urbahns, the people close to a situation who are now just as likely to break news as any major press outlet will be. The people who follow them and obsessively retweet form a "curator class" of people who, whether they're employed in the media or not, have seen their Twitter accounts become must-follows for employees at the news outlets themselves. Those outlets then get to fact-checking, tracking down the origins of claims and speculations, verifying those Google Earth images for use on-air, and expanding the real information beyond its 140-character confines.
The process of gathering and reporting the news has always been more complicated than it ever looks on paper or onscreen, but it's never been this complicated--and the public has never been able to see as much of it as they can now. What's liberating about it all is that everyday Internet users have the option to choose which field they want to play on, so to speak. You can customize TweetDeck with a half dozen columns, set up breaking-news alerts on your cell phone, and get ready to start hitting that "retweet" button. As many people in New York and D.C. did when they heard about the celebratory rallies at the White House and outside the former World Trade Center site, you can run outside with that camera phone in hand. But for those concerned about misinformation, or lacking the desire to dive into raw Twitter material and feel like they're a part of the news itself, responsible and carefully informed mainstream news takes on a new and crucial role.
News outlets shouldn't feel threatened by the Twitter effect; they should feel empowered because their job's gotten a whole lot bigger and more complicated. We need the noise, but more than ever, we need the signal.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
2
8
