Twitter is a platform that is gaining a lot of ground in the journalism field as a means to spread information regarding new articles being posted on the homepage, as well as updates in conferences among many things. Being featured on most news websites, such as those produced by Canwest, Twitter opens up options for journalists to create news posts and updates while on the field where it would be otherwise impossible to get the information out to the public because of its simple web integration and applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other smartphones.
Beyond spreading the word about news and the latest articles, Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read Write Web notes how Twitter can be used to obtain tips on news stories.
"We discover tech news tips on Twitter first on a regular basis. When Google bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, for example, we learned about it on Twitter. That early news tip lead to our covering the news before any one else and getting our story on the front page of Digg - good in this case for tens of thousands of pageviews."
Twitter is increasingly becoming a source for story ideas and can help to further investigations which ultimately lead to better stories and increased readership.
Not everything is great when it comes to Twitter because of the hash tag system, keywords that identify a topic such as #journalism, can become tedious because users can create their own hash tags. As Matt White said in a blog post regarding Twitter and hash tags, "the use of hash tags and the poor search capabilities are far too confusing and time consuming to be considered productive at this point."
Although hash tags can be confusing and cumbersome to use, the overall appeal of Twitter for journalism remains dominant as it allows writers to create better stories and allow more readers to find out about stories that are important to the world.
Image from Stephen's Lighthouse
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