I haven’t been a long time user of Twitter, but now that I have Twitterific forever occupying the lower right corner of my monitor, I’ve increasingly noticed how much quicker the twittersphere is at reporting breaking news than traditional news sources. A couple of interesting take-aways here:
- A lot of the “early” tweets I see, ironically, link to or are part of a link chain that trace back to a traditional news media outlet which squashes my main point. That said though, I don’t follow every news company out there so in effect, comparing the news outlets I do follow vs. all my other non-media follows, the peeps win the race to inform me often.
- This only happens with national or international news. For local coverage, @denverpost is much faster. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a local news tweet from anyone I follow. @denverpost is the only game in town in this regard.
- I’m not the only one who has noticed this trend: @isaacson said not long ago… wow twitter is ridiculously ahead of CNN and the mainstream news in reporting the #GAZA ceasefire. Also, I took a screenshot (but it’s at home, I’ll update when I can UPDATE: Screenshot below) of two tweets on the same subject next to one another in my Twitterific stream. CNN was the later tweet.
- I wonder if anyone DMs or replies to their local newspaper or TV news station about niche news events in hopes that the news organizations could then broadcast (or, more likely, re-broadcast) to its followers as a micro-local news stream. They could add those mentions in their main Twitter account or, if the barrage became too spammy for a general public audience (which by definition it would be), they could set up separate Twitter accounts. But I suppose at that point, the Twitter accounts become so niche focused, the effort involved would outweigh the number of followers. Then again, maybe they could have a local feed and a micro-local feed and let people choose for themselves. Anyway, something to consider- and it probably has, I just haven’t come across it.
Here’s the Twitterific screenshot I mentioned above. Cameron Moll beat CNN to the punch.
