Will Twitter SAVE newspapers?

Great Debates
1

Inspired by this thread.

At 4:12 PM (I assume EST) on June 5, 2012, tazeen tweeted:

Sometime after that, Declan Walsh or Eric Schmitt or someone else at The New York Times saw that tweet and used it to end the leading story, Al Qaeda’s No. 2 Said To Be Killed In A Drone Strike, on the front page of The New York Times, June 6, 2012.

To put this into perspective, at 7:30 PM on June 5, 2012, AmandaBynes tweeted:

Timing is everything. Hilarious.

Where’s the text from Hillary where the President asks the Secretary of State to respond to AmandaBynes’ tweet?

As much as I love Amanda Bynes, I think The New York Times made the right editorial decision to incorporate the tweet by tazeen into the front page story and not the tweet by AmandaBynes.

The tweet by AmandaBynes does not belong in The New York Times (unless for some reason the President responds to her tweet); however, the tweet by tazeen does. There is a quote by Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary. There are two quotes by American officials, speaking anonymously. There is a quote by Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal. There is a quote by a senior Pakistani security official, speaking anonymously. And there is a quote by Tazeen Jay, a blogger. The last quote is significant.

In the future, The New York Times and other newspapers will get most, if not all, of their quotes from Twitter. Indeed, Twitter will help “write” newspaper articles and newspapers, in turn, will give a platform for Twitter. The quote by Tazeen Jay that was from Twitter, arguably, adds to the article. Without Twitter, someone like her would not make it into The New York Times. I’m sure that the President, upon reading that article, would think that what Tazeen Jay had to say is as just as important, if not more important, than what Jay Carney, his Press Secretary, had to say.

All newspapers need to do is: use more tweets as quotes and have an E-Edition of the paper edition with hyperlinks so that readers can go from the front page to A6 and from a quote to the tweet citing the quote.

Newspapers without Twitter are stale, Twitter without newspapers is chaos.

2

Are you familiar with the phrase “burying the lede?”

Because that’s exactly what you are doing in describing the newspaper article. You’re saying the Twitter quote is the most important part of the whole story, when it is actually the very last line in the story. The article starts out using anonymous sources, proceeds to White House spokesmen on the record, continues to on-the-record sources outside of government, goes to anonymous foreign sources, and then has twelve words from a blogger. By saying that the Twitter source is more important than the five or so sources that precede it, you are burying the lede.

3

Yes.

I was describing the newspaper article. I was being descriptive NOT perscriptive. I was describing the sources in the order in which they were quoted NOT the order in which they should have been quoted.

That’s my point. Before Twitter, newspapers had quotes from sources. Now, newspapers are starting to have *tweets *from sources. Of course, tweets are quotes. However, what is significant is that Tazeen Jay posted that tweet not likely having the intention of it being in The New York Times. No one at The New York Times contacted Tazeen Jay and, conversely, Tanzeen Jay did not contact anyone at The New York Times. Someone at The New York Times found that tweet on Twitter and decided to include it in the article, albeit at the very end.

4

Say newspapers can get their quotes from Twitter instead of emails or phone calls. How does that save them exactly? Does it bring in millions of dollars in ad revenue somehow?

5

Persumably, the same way Twitter makes money.

6

Newspapers already have ads. I am not sure you’ve thought this through unless you meant to ask ‘Will Twitter SAVE newspapers a couple of minutes here and there?’

7

What a great model for journalism: anything more than 140 characters is too much information. Call me when the New York Times starts using the Straight Dope Message Board as a source.

8

Are you familiar with the term “sound bite”?

9

Yes. That’s a term used for TV and radio journalism. Print uses quotes, which they can get from Twitter or through other means. Would you mind explaining what your thesis is exactly?

10

Usually, sound bites are short statements edited from a longer context to pass along one important thought. Sound bites generally are not the entire thought – Twitter is nothing but sound bites without context. Is that really what you expect of quality journalism?

11

I’m wondering if Kozmik thinks newspapers employ tons of reporters who do nothing except man the phones and call sources for comments on stories, and if those reporters will be made superfluous by Twitter - saving the newspapers money and thus fixing their business model by offsetting all the revenue they’ve lost from advertisers over the years. That’s not how it works, though. Most quotes are obtained by the reporter covering the story in the first place. Those reporters may save a few minutes by getting quotes from Twitter, but that’s about it. And Twitter is not going to be the source of that many quotes because it just doesn’t have enough users. You can get a quote from a politician or big company on Twitter, but with private citizens it’s going to be hit or miss. It’d be a good source of reaction quotes but a terrible substitute for a full interview, for example. And people who fear retribution aren’t going to use Twitter. Getting a quote is a necessary part of a story but it’s only a small part of it.

Or does the OP think newspapers will just be compilations of daily tweets, maybe with a little commentary? There are already websites that do that, so there’s little or no need for a newspaper to do it.

12

And I will put this charitably: those websites do not quite measure up to the quality of the New York Times.

13

Not that they’re trying to. We’re talking about celebrity gossip sites here, and it’s hard to see other types of media outlets getting a significant amount of content from Twitter. A soundbyte is not a story. It’s not a replacement for a story, and rarely does it generate a story. When it does, it tends to be longer-term analysis rather than hard news. Soundbytes can sum up a story and bring clarity, but a new source of kicker quotes and reactions is not what newspapers are looking for. It’s true that Twitter has changed the way news stories are broken, covered, and analyzed, but the ways in which it has done so have not been beneficial to newspapers. They just point out one of the biggest problems facing print journalism, and certainly none of this addresses declining revenue from advertisements and subscriptions.

14

Newspapers provide the context; Twitter provides (some of) the content.

Why not? Do you think it could be done in a way that would add to articles and benefit newspapers?

15

It proves a tiny fraction of the content. How does that save newspapers?

Twitter can be updated almost instantly and a print newspaper can’t. Websites can be updated faster and maybe we’ll get to full, updatable e-newspapers at some point, but we’re not there right now. If it does happen maybe THAT would save newspaper journalism, but Twitter wouldn’t.

Like I said, an additional source of quotes does not exactly revolutionize the newspaper business. I don’t see how Twitter can be much more than that from a newspaper perspective. OK, one day they can source quotes directly from Twitter with links. So?