Twitter and Media Groupthink: A Bum Rap
Scripps Media
Is Twitter forcing journalists to march in mindless lockstep?
On the surface, the notion seems absurd. Media folks may hang out on Twitter as the new cool kids’ club, but isn’t the point to broadcast your own brand? Why would anyone in the news racket want to echo what the rest of the gang is saying?
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank conjured up the thesis after seeing hordes of colleagues tweeting away at a presidential debate. It is on all those laptop screens, he says, that “the conventional wisdom gels — and subsequent tweets, except those from the most hardened partisans, increasingly reflect the Twitter-forged consensus.”
Before explaining why this is utterly wrong — okay, mostly wrong — a little background on what has become a powerhouse social media network. Twitter is the new AP, I like to say, a place where journalists often break news, even before feeding it to their employers. This happened to me a couple of weeks back when I learned from a source while driving that Roger Ailes had signed a new four-year deal to run Fox News. I pulled over, tweeted it on my iPad, and watched it ricochet across the web well before I could write an actual story.
This is a bit of a problem, as news organizations aren’t getting the traffic from these posts. But they are still getting credit, and the truth is we have no choice but to be part of that conversation. With its plethora of web links and more than 500 million users, Twitter is a heck of a self-promotional vehicle for those trying (sometimes relentlessly) to publicize their own work.
But the site can also be a minefield that claims journalists as collateral damage.
Read the rest at CNN.com
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