Twitter as news

Is twitter news? Yes, but not in conventional way.  Short answer is, it is the source for breaking news, among a small, young and affluent audience. That is a small fraction of what it is because it is many things to many people.

The day of a morning and afternoon newspaper, 3 networks news channels and vinyl records are over.  Social media spreads lots of news and Twitter is a huge part of that. Welcome to the digital age and the transformation of the the analog world.

What it isn’t, not FB, FB has more people getting their news off of it, a larger market share, a more diverse market, yet delivers something total different and has different strengths and weaknesses. As of 2013, FB has 1.1 billion users vs 230 million users.

Facts about twitter making it different than FB, 140 characters, just the facts and hyperlink, 1) Good for passing along info 2) Conversation shifts and evolves 3) Not a reliable gauge of public opinion, changes in real time.

It is also one of the top 10 most visited websites.

Less than 10% of adults get their news on Twitter, unless “adult” is qualified, under 30 year old adults the number goes up. Plus, twitter followers tweet news stories and follow news journalist, are informed, educated and more likely to affluent.

On 11 March, 2011, I watched on my computer and watched the Tsumami hit Japan and I realized the power and impact of Twitter on a news event unfolding in real time.

Three years and one day latter, an explostion at 9:31, Twitter picks up the event 12 minutes before the 1st major news reports that a serious event occurs.  The map above shows tweets from the explosion.

Twitter has been an element of social communication since the riots in Iran, a tool in the Occupy movement and the Arab spring. It was described as "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history. the Green movement remains the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media.  Last spring, the Prime Minister of Turkey band social media until his election was over.

The Pentagon pundits scandal was a scandal where retired officers where put on the dole by Donald Rumsfield and given talking points to share with the mainstream media to rally support of the war in Iraq.

Analog approach verses a digital one.  President Obama using social networking and the Internet in 2008 “must seek outside authorities to give credibility to seemingly neutral reports”,  verses using twitter allows reaction to events, get message across w/ 4.6 million or 42.3 million followers getting message from source.

The future of Twitter will prove that digital media is the future of communicating the news while analog exists along with it until it diminishes it as it fads away or the business model adapts to a smaller market share or dies. Twitter is a critical and irreplaceable part of any process that seeks to verify breaking events.

This was a project for a Media and Journalism class that I took last semester.  It was a great class that I enjoyed very much.