Will Twitter Move Markets?
Is Twitter the next wire service, those news agencies long associated with breaking news pre-Internet?
A February post on ReadWriteWeb tells about Twitter breaking news of a UK earthquake long before traditional media outlets were reporting. Robert Scoble did the same for the China earthquake earlier this year, and most recently, the July 29th earthquake in California was the subject of tweets while the Golden State was still shaking.
Early in my reporting career I worked for United Press International. When I would telephone an editor back in the bureau to dictate my story (in prehistoric 1978), the first question always asked: “Was AP (my chief competitor, the Associated Press) there?” Years later, working in the Washington, D.C. bureau of a financial wire service in the pre-cellphone days, my competitors and I would race for one of the few pay telephones stationed in the House or Senate office buildings when the chairman of the Federal Reserve answered a question during testimony that had the ability to move the financial markets.
When reporters started carrying cellphones and cameras were allowed into hearings and briefings, every comment, every answer, every statement had the ability to make news. Citizen journalists, bloggers and live television feeds have changed the landscape yet again.
And now Twitter is posed to change the speed that information is shared, or how news is broken or made. Just this past Friday, two congressmen spread the word about the GOP energy protest through their Twitter micro-blogs.
When stock, bond and commodity traders start tweeting, financial reporters may run to their Twitter accounts rather than a cellphone or a laptop to break the news.
Watching a War
I’ve been watching YouTube postings about the war in Iraq. I am struck by how some of the videos look like video games and how some war footage is raw and how some is set to music. It is almost like it isn’t real. And yet, at the same time, it is very real.
During the first Gulf War, CNN changed the way those of us “back home” saw the war. For the first time, cameras recorded the fighting, scud attacks and blood shed which often appeared on our television screen without the filter of an editor. The frightened voices of journalists sometimes accompanied that raw footage.
Now, the current Iraq conflict is brought into our living rooms — or where ever our computer is set up — through video clips captured by camcorders or cell phones and posted on YouTube. No editor or journalistic filter is required.
I found myself wondering–just who was filming and posting these videos? Were these soldiers entering combat with a camera and a weapon? Was the film from journalists or bystanders? Who edited and added music and graphics to some of the postings? And why did some of the YouTube videos have 300+ views and others thousands. Or, as the one I just watched, “US Marines In Iraq Real Footage Warning Graphic” had more than 3 million hits. 3,642,405 to be exact. Is this the new citizen journalism? See for yourself:
New Horizons
You can take a girl out of traditional journalism but can you take traditional journalism out of the girl?
Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that through hard work and extensive reporting a journalist educates her readers on events or issues that the general public does not have access to. But I also realize that the first CNN camera that recorded unfiltered events as they happened (a White Bronco driving down the 405 Freeway or scud attacks during the first Gulf War) changed the way journalists delivered the news and the way the public wanted it delivered. Most important, it also started the evolution of WHO would deliver the news.
In his book, We the Media, Dan Gillmor makes the case for grassroots journalism or citizen journalism. The media and technology savvy public want to be part of the conversation. And in the age of IM , texting and cell phone video, we want our news, information and, of course celebrity gossip NOW. As a traditionalist I worry about this new direction and the new definition of “news,” perhaps almost as much as traditional historians worried about the first oral histories they encountered.
I also realize that grassroots journalism brings more stories–perhaps the stories that we all really care about — to a wider audience. And, as more traditional journalistic tools (printed newspapers and magazines) struggle to stay afloat, at least there are newer methods of engaging citizens in the conversation.
Grassroots journalism certainly gives new meaning to the old Walter Cronkite news series, “You Are There.”
