Twitter: An aid to serious and citizen journalists

The micro-blogging site Twitter is becoming more popular not only for average people and those looking for something on the bleeding edge of blogging, but it is slowly becoming a tool utilized by news organizations and individual journalist. Organizations like CNN and The New York Times use it to get headlines and breaking news to users quickly and individual journalists use it to throw out ideas and get opinions from followers. I guess it’s a sign of the times, but it’s encouraging to see major news organizations using and accepting these new mediums of news delivery.

However, as major organizations are just being introduced to the product, citizen journalists have been using Twitter for quite some time. While “citizen journalist” might not be the term used to describe everybody who blogs a current event, it is certainly another tool that allows average people to get the news out to others more quickly than traditional news mediums. The first time I ever heard about something like this was following the earthquake in China earlier this year. Twitter users in China had updates as simple as “earthquake” posted within seconds of the event happening. While these “tweets” weren’t serious journalism, they were a way of getting the news out to other much faster than traditional sources. (I believe I saw somewhere that it took CNN about 15 or 20 minutes to get the story on air, which is the average time for a breaking story like that.)

The same thing happened again yesterday with the events in Mumbai. Twitter users in the area were using the site to provide first-hand accounts and updates of what they saw. Again, with a breaking story like this, CNN was all over the place trying to gather, credit and present news about what was going on. While accounts like these should be taken with a grain of salt and major news networks should be trusted over individual accounts, it’s just another step in giving more power to ordinary people.

If I had to pick a medium to get all my late-breaking news from, I would definitely go to someone like CNN first, and I think most people would agree. But that’s not to say the power and influence of Twitter and programs like it should not be taken into consideration. Tools like this, which can get news directly to users faster than TV or print mediums, should be given a lot of attention and more utilization if journalists want to stay on that bleeding edge.