A sparkling analysis but unfair to cable channel newspeople, other journalists bloggers, etc. who must fill predetermined amounts of time and unlimited amounts of space but lack news organizations to help them fill either one. Some quantifiable leeway must be recognized for such fact as 1.opinion is cheaper than reporting, 2. opinions based on spoken or written foolishnesses are easier to report than those which require prior research.
Felix Salmon on Blogs
Felix hit on something here
…And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante. to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.
It’s about how function follows the form. All production technology imposes its own limitations on the journalism produced, but this dynamic is worth thinking about.
“The scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil.” http://nyti.ms/t7gs5Q
Ah, so we agree, @felixsalmon, that the first Tweet
should be right, which was my point:
Says our man Felix:
“Without the retweet, or any link to follow, it looks as though it’s first-hand reporting — and no journalist ever wants their first-hand reporting to be in error.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/07/28/being-wrong-on-twitter/?dlvrit=60132
This was basically all I’m saying.
Retweeting something from a murky source is a different matter, but certainly RTers should at least pause to consider. But, yes, having the original source and link makes a big difference.
The idea of re-reporting every RT is a red herring. You’d have to be the actual pope of news to want that.
P.s. Felix, the link to Anthony DeRosa’s original Tweet is broken, which make it hard to figure out what he actually did. Just sayin.
Here’s a good link:
http://twitter.com/#!/AntDeRosa/status/96617333845540866
I’m *not* about jumping up and down about the original Tweet. It is NOT a big deal. But it’s a good thought experiment, which I think is Felix’s main point. Felix does it again.
@felixsalmon, I don’t mind being the killjoy.
I can see how Twitter may be a step short of publishing (or is it?), but Twitter’s not a like newsroom because those have four walls, while Twitter’s amplification power is potentially very large. Your “newsroom” has 25,000, sorry, *30,000*, people in it. It’s a lot closer to publishing than being in a closed news meeting. And while there was no harm done in the Piers Morgan case, it’s not at all hard to think of some harm resulting in truly stupid cases (bank runs is only one, and there are worse scenarios I can think of) if we applied your Twitter-is-a-newsroom standard.
I like the higher-standards idea for big new organizations, and maybe looser ones for others. Like everyone, I like the freedom to make mistakes, or not be totally perfect, without feeling like someone in HR is keeping track. Twitter does feel rather cozy sometimes, but that’s deceptive. The reason people feel a bit of embarrassment after making a mistake on Twitter is precisely because it’s so public. Embarrassment plays the same role on Twitter as it does in print. It makes you careful, and that’s not so bad.
Hey someone has to wag the finger.
