I've been a bit of an apostle for Twitter in the CBC newsroom in St. John's, to the point sometimes that eyes roll once I get going. Nonetheless, the @cbcnl feed is flourishing, and more and more of my colleagues have come on board. (An aggregated list can be seen here.)
The best set of arguments I've ever seen for why Twitter matters to journalism appeared Friday on the Guardian's site, with editor Alan Rusbridger laying out each point. The piece is an excerpt from a lecture, and here's the first argument:
1) It's an amazing form of distribution
It's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide.
Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds. That has profound implications for our economic model, never mind the journalism.
That's just the start. Read the rest here. It's worth the time.
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