also, a regular Twitter user.

it all sounds so simple, don’t it? journalists are now the audience (actually, we’ve always been part of the audience) and everyone is, or has the potential to be, a “journalist.”

my definition is slightly different: journalists are those who are paid to report the news. and as we dwindle in number — because publishers will almost always opt for free or cheap whenever they can — actual journalism will suffer.

yes, twitter is great for saying “hey, a cable on the bay bridge snapped.” it’s even great for updates on the status of repairs. my wife followed this on her phone on a recent trip to SF.

what twitter isn’t great for: why the cable snapped. who was responsible. who’s trying to duck responsibility. who will fix it. what it will cost. why it wasn’t fixed correctly the first time. how safe are the other cables? do other bridges have this problem? is this part of a greater problem of infrastructure crumbling due to neglect? what happens to all those tax $$ that go to Caltrans anyway? and do they really need 5 people to fill one pothole?

kinda hard to cover in 140 characters, no?

this is why we need journalists. but not the unpaid kind.

cheers,

dt

Whenever a journalist sees the word media they know it’s about them because many did media studies and media theory way back whenever.

Many of the tropes of journalism – breaking stories, just the facts, no personal bias etc were always medium is the message tropes Every medium has its versions of these and as media evolve so do these.

I would think a future journalist will operate the same way as a past one just differently as they say. Journalists should settle down about all this and go with the flow. Different for the owners of the printing presses of course.

Also, you come close to that annoying recent habit of saying ”It was on Twitter first”, and implying that means ”So there’s no point anyone else covering it”.

Being first on a story (which electronic media such as the internet and radio naturally do best) is no guarantee of accuracy, or intelligibility. In fact it often puts those at risk, and other media must later knit the fragments together into a story that more closely resembles history.