Twitter Journalism

The first report of the miraculous rescue of 150 passengers from a US Airways jet floating in the Hudson River also provided the latest evidence – if indeed it was still needed – that emerging social media are not only supplementing but supplanting the legacy mainstream media. Full Story »

Posted by Rory O'Connor

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Review

Fabrice Florin
3.9
by Fabrice Florin - Jan. 19, 2009

Informative interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about the rise of their service as a "go-to source of news you can use." The author focuses this conversation on the intersection of journalism and social media services like Twitter (see related links and quotes on this story page).

Disclosure: Author Rory O'Connor is a NewsTrust host and editor, and played a formative role as Editorial Director at the service's inception.

We think that social media is largely comparable to traditional approach, in that credibility is key. In the future, social media tools will help the news media know such things as the location of the person reporting, we will be able to provide a social graph of our users… Can we then triangulate about their credibility via algorithm? We can certainly begin to get very sophisticated on credibility with new tools, and combine that with journalists leveraging open systems such as ours to find and vet crowd sources, story leads, etc. Looking ahead, I see more sophisticated tools to deal with this issue. A credibility algorithm may be possible one day. Maybe it is even now, as rudimentary as it would still be. Our recent election feed, for example, was a smart feed. As we go forward and learn more about open systems, we can filter better and thus get more credibility. But filtering is how we get there…so one should not rely on social media alone.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone

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Fabrice's Rating

Overall
3.9

Good
from 13 answers
Quality
3.8
Information
4.0
Insight
4.0
Style
4.0
Context
4.0
Enterprise
3.0
Expertise
4.0
Originality
3.0
Relevance
4.0
Popularity
4.0
Recommendation
4.0
Credibility
4.0
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