Consider the journalism on Twitter, not whether Twitter is journalism

By Michael Becker | Published: November 29, 2009

Twitter is a medium and cannot be considered as a whole, writes Alfred Hermida, who’s worried that we’re about to rehash the old argument about whether a new medium “is journalism.”

Rather than arguing about whether Twitter is or isn’t journalism, we should shift the conversation to understanding the journalism taking place on this platform and its relationship to established journalism norms and practices.

The problem that I’ve seen is that journalists try to categorize Twitter as one thing, but that’s like trying to categorize all magazines as one thing, like lumping Teen Beat with the Economist. Media aren’t flat and easy to summarize; they are faceted and full of niches where many interests (and products) take hold.

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  3. Richard Sambrook: Transparency is the new objectivity, and the Internet is not your enemy
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  5. Building a Twitter strategy
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  • lucythorpe
    BBC news people and other established news figures as quoted in Alf's article only seem comfortable when talking about twitter as a tool, something they can use. To get them to engage with Twitter as a mass medium or journalism-in- the- raw appears to be too uncomfortabel for them. Do they choose cynicism and disdain instead because they feel threatened ?
  • Twitter moves too fast. Levels of editing that have been built into journalism for a century get thrown out the window.

    The goal becomes immediacy, and accuracy become less important. I think that's because Twitter isn't a "newspaper of record." In 20 years, no one is going to be looking at Twitter for information about the past.

    But reporters and journalists are stuck in the mentality that everything they write will have the critical eye of history glaring down at it. They are attached to their words in a way that the so-called digital natives aren't.
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