Brittany's Technology Blog

Twitter, no longer just a social network site for technology savvy, teenage gossipers, has taken hold of the traditional media and has become a story worth talking about within itself.  Proving its potential power during the aftermath of the Iranian elections, Twitter may very well be the next major media platform alongside Facebook, Youtube, and many other Internet sites.  

Twitter is a convenient and efficient way to communicate, especially if you’re on a journalist’s schedule.  With a limit of 140 characters, journalists can tweet headlines and breaking pieces of news that are short, sweet, and to the point. Twitter also gives media companies the opportunity to get their news out faster than their competition and connect with the audience in a completely new way. A journalist does not have to have the whole story to tweet. One simple and confirmed fact will do until the rest of the story can be validated.

Twitter is an ideal media platform for journalists until the human factor is added into the mix. Journalism ethics and Twitter are currently a hot topic in the media world.  One would think that the ethics applied to other sequences of media would apply to this new form of socialized media, however it is not just as simple as that.  Twitter is not as controllable as newspapers, magazines, and news programs that have editing processes that are closely monitored. Journalists that tweet have too much freedom to mix personal opinion with professional opinion. The ideal journalist is one that reports in an unbiased fashion. The journalist represents their employer, so when a journalist tweets information they are tweeting with their company’s reputation in their hands. Journalists should be careful to tweet strictly as a professional and not give into the temptation to tweet personal opinions and grievances.  

Twitter seems to have already started paving its way towards the future of journalism. While many companies are weary of letting their journalist jump into this “unknown” media platform, Twitter has the potential to connect the traditional media to the world in ways it could not before.