The Twitter Trap
Howard Kurtz 2/22/12
Media Critic Howard Kurtz discusses how journalists incorporate Twitter into their reporting and when do you give away too much of the story before official publication. And who is actually breaking news nowadays? Mediaite recently noted that a young woman had tweeted the following: “@ShankarSharanya: Driver in front of my cab, STOPPED & fired 5 gun shots at the White House." Journalists picked up the story, even as D.C. police insisted this was a mere dispute between two cars, and it turned out there was a bullethole in the executive mansion.
“So who broke the story? Sharanya? The reporters who retweeted her? No one?” asks Mediaite. In other words, is news the raw observation, or the discovery and refining of the raw observation?
Contrast that with Craig Silverman's Poynter article: False Paterno death reports highlight journalists’ hunger for glory.
In the rush to be first are journalists serving the public? Or just trying to have bragging rights among other journalists? “If you’re right and first, no one remembers. If you’re first and wrong, everyone remembers.”
“Nobody’s going to scroll through a zillion time stamps to say, Oh, this guy had it three minutes earlier!” tweeted Esquire and Grantland writer Chris Jones. “Readers remember the best story, not the first story.”
