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Eye witness reports have long been a mainstay of local news reporting and Twitter merely makes those eyewitnesses easier and faster to access. What I find mildly worrying is the increasing number of stories being filed out there that are 'stood up' on Tweets. It would seem that all a journalist has to do is find a few outraged Tweets and before you can spell veracity backwards we've got headlines like 'public rage' and 'Internet outburst'. The great thing about this is there's no seeming need to actually quantify 'public rage', and making the assertion can now be backed with a couple of tweets from Furious of Guildford and Angry of Barsha. Even worse, the tweets from those with an opposing or more moderate viewpoint get left out because they don't help the angle the journalist has taken - we none of us are interested in that. As I have long said, we slow down to look at the terrible accident, but we never slow down to look at the happy family having a picnic. What sells newspapers (or clicks, which in many ways are worse for preserving news values than the pressure to sell papers) is drama, outrage and the like.
And when you can tap negative public reaction, all too easily expressed on Twitter but almost always only half the story as online opinions are almost invariably balanced by others weighing in, you've got a nice easy story that really doesn't require much work at all to put together. As long as you don't muck it up by presenting the whole picture and actually bothering to produce a professional tone analysis rather than a few selected tweets...
4 comments:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100146646232137568790/posts/hNKC1xKgy4Q
I once stared at some people having a picnic. They threatened to call the police.
The amazing ones are in the Arab media outlets. Only over a year ago, they would laugh at you for pitching a story about 'twitter growth' or anything related to social media. Now, social media is their 'qeblah' when writing their stories.
Doesn't seem significantly different to the TV/newspaper tradition of vox pops/man on the street quotes, which seem to me to be equally unscientific, unrepresentative, and vulnerable to distortion according to the preferences / interests / time constraints etc of the reporter.
Reality is, a lot of media is a subjective reading of the temperature of public debate, and vary rarely is it based on conclusive polling or an exhaustive mission to identify all the various strands of ideas in the debate.
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