Is Twitter Killing Real-Time Journalism?
Not Quite — But Journalists Aren’t Helping
Senator John McCain last Tuesday he was going to run for his seat again in 2016. But I didn’t hear about it from the Associated Press. I saw it on Twitter from New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich). And he heard it from a radio interview the Senator conducted in his home state. Then, he tweeted.
In the modern era of Internet-centrism, eyeballs equate to advertising revenue. Thus, Twitter could be the best thing that has ever happened to journalism.
Unfortunately, the tech Luddites running the AP perceive Twitter as an enemy. Recently, they issued a curious set of commandments to their reporters that can be best summed up as: “Thou shall not Tweet!”
Morsels of news, such as the McCain moment, must be run through the AP’s byzantine internal editorial process for fear of “scooping the wire.” This direct from the AP rule book:
“Don’t break news on social networks that we haven’t published in AP’s news services. If you have a piece of information, a photo, video or audio that is compelling, exclusive and/or urgent enough to be considered breaking news, you should make it available to AP services before you consider putting it out on social media. There may be occasional exceptions to this rule, but they must be prearranged with your manager and approved by a Nerve Center manager.”
Huh? Speed wins eyeballs. Period. These rules bring to mind a wayward principal telling schoolchildren to consult the handbook before evacuating in case of a fire.
There was a time when newswires like the AP and Reuters were the source for breaking news. They were writing the first draft of history, as the saying goes, and their reporters steered the news cycle.
Those days are long gone. We learned about street protests in Tehran from Twitter, and the micro blogging service is proving itself worthy of our attention because of its ability to aggregate personalized news in a way the news media, so far, has failed to do.
Reporters, equipped with social media, can break news online before they even put pen to paper. But that’s not a problem. It’s a chance for savvy outlets to deploy their talented reporters in new ways. For example, to slingshot back into relevance, couldn’t the AP set up a special, AP-branded Twitter feed specifically for breaking news online?
Is Twitter the death of journalism? Sort of. Short-form newswire journalism must evolve and become less dependent upon its current format to thrive. But we will also drift away from fast-breaking, fact-driven information as our main medium for understanding the world.
While Twitter makes the AP obsolete (or, more accurately, the AP makes itself obsolete), we are surrounded by the din of hard facts and micro-bursts of news. Inevitably, we will yearn for media in a different format. Long-format articles longer than the 140-character and 650-word throwaway pieces will experience a Renaissance.
Pulling back from the relentless churn of information in our modern world means some of us will fall into the repose perfected by the fin-de-siècle French stroller, le flâneur. There is an allure here for those of us who crave the white space of contemplation now crowded out by the infinite loop of social media-fired news.
Bijan Stephen makes this point beautifully in an essay in The Paris Review. “But as we grow inexorably busier—due in large part to the influence of technology—might flânerie be due for a revival?”
It’s a good question. It’s also something unanswerable via Twitter.
