Extra, Extra. Tweet all about it!

By Susan O'Rourke

“News no longer breaks; it tweets,” according to Brian Solis from Engage Magazine. Social media sites such as Twitter have begun to change the way people receive and report news each day making it more accessible, faster, and appealing to the younger generation.

So the question to ask is, is twitter journalism the way most journalism will be for future generations to come? Some like to argue that it is not and as there are more alternative ways to receive the news that are just as fast but the context is much better compared to Twitter. According to Michael Del Monte from Scribble Live, “Twitter works nicely for providing links to existing stories, but with all due respect to those who consider it the future of news, it is not a workable or desirable medium for journalism. Twitter’s limitations make it a poor medium for news coverage.”

Despite opposing views to Twitter’s capability of becoming a legitimate news medium, most believe that journalists have to hop on the Twitter bandwagon, as it will be beneficial for news reporting in the future. For instance, Twitter has been the source for breaking news as big news stories in the past have broke first on twitter like the US Airways flight crash landing into the Hudson, Twitter was the first to “beat the world to the story that a jet had gone down in the drink.”

In an interview between Rory O’Connor from the Huffington Post, and Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder , O’Connor questioned her on the development of the social media site and what she for sees in the future for the site. Stone commented on the fact that news organizations are taking notice on how Twitter is impacting news reporting and places like CNN, New York Times and so on have all began to use Twitter.

It is evident that Twitter is becoming the future of journalism and will virtually become the primary news source to people around the world. Rory O’Connor says, “Twitter has become a go-to source of news you can use when and where you want and need it -- often when and where the legacy media cannot yet or no longer supplies it.”