Sweet Twitterings

During an interview, the good folks at the Poynter Institute learned that NBC news legend Tom Brokaw (a non-Tweeter) doesn't believe Twitter has not proven itself journalistically yet. He also doesn't get the "Tweebs" who use it. Brokaw said:

"I don't get Twitter. I know that it's very popular and that it's a quick way of getting a text blast out, so to speak, but an awful lot of it seems to be ... just stuff that fills air. [When the Mumbai attacks occurred], it alerted the world to what was going on, but was that journalism or was it just a cry for help?"

Journalistically, Brokaw is right. Though Twitter can be useful for real time information, it’s unfiltered. As such, be wary of its accuracy. He’s also right that most tweets on any given topic are just content-free confetti. Still, none of this means Twitter doesn't offer value.

Along with an occasional (and mostly impossible) 140-character “commentary,” I use Twitter to alert folks to news I think is important, thoughtful or stimulating in some useful way. But mainly I employ it as a digital fire hose of political news & commentary from the reporters/pundits I trust. Best of all, it has liberated me from the TV talk shows. So that’s Twitter’s value to me. Now, would I be there if the national press corps wasn’t there? Not a chance.

If you use Twitter to fill your own “news hole” (as we say in the business) on some topic of interest, then it’s valuable. I’m way less convinced about the worth of exchanging banalities with “Tweebs” for its own sake. But, alas, this is the activity makes up the bulk of traffic on Twitter. And that makes no sense to me. But as Star Trek’s Captain Picard puts it, “sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd.” I'm doubling over.