Column:
Twitter allows everyone to be a journalist
Published Nov. 13, 2009
With this column, I try to veer away from journalism and media-centric topics. As a journalism major I'm surrounded by #journchat style discussions, and I'm pretty sure the majority of people don't want to hear me geek out about the Journalist's Creed or the difference between multimedia and multi-platform storytelling. But with the exponential increase of people using Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc., and the constant intersection of journalism and social media, everyone is a part of the news gathering and reporting processes.
This Tuesday was a perfect example of that as plenty of Jefferson City interns, mid-Missouri journalists and even state legislators tweeted away about the potential hostage situation. Someone started a Twitter list to keep the information together, #jcmo became a commonly used hashtag (a way to collect Twitter updates from different users and essentially create a conversation or make it easy to track information on a given subject), and my Tweetdeck was spinning nonstop with "retweets" of postings by @PeterKinder, @KOMUNews, @CoMissourian and @Missourinet. I'll admit I, too, was a part of the ubiquitous Twitter stream. I retweeted a few things I thought to be important without doing any reporting on my own.
Note that: without doing any reporting on my own.
As the day went on, the information overload became too much to handle, and things just got confusing. Gunshots were fired — wait, no they weren't. Fact A is confirmed. Oh wait, it's false. It was a huge mash-up of speculations and hazy misconceptions as reporters for different news outlets and people actually near the site of the "potential situation" concerned about their friends, family and colleagues tried to find out what was going on. I appreciate people trying to get the word out, I really do. But sometimes an overabundance of information is worse than not having enough details — and this was one of those times.
One of the problems was instead of doing any actual reporting on our own, as I mentioned above, we just kept repeating what had already been said, and in excess, which didn't help matters much. What we should have been doing was coming up with new ways to conceptualize information, like @jeffcitysports did when it created a map of all the places mentioned in relation to the story. Or at least we should have been confirming information before we reposted it. If we couldn't do that because a) we didn't know how to or b) people who could confirm the information were too busy to actually do something about it — noting we hadn't confirmed it or explicitly saying something along the lines of "Heard a RUMOR that the #JCMOhostage may be related to a robbery in the JCMO area," such as @Mo_Soy did.
Twitter has become a place to do more than just post links to Web sites with pretty pictures of cupcakes or post about what we're doing that day; it's become a hub with which to communicate information in breaking news situations. And though sometimes it's good to spread the word by repeating what we've heard, we do need to be responsible for what we're posting as well — confirming the information on our own or making sure a trusted newsroom or source has done that.
Whether you consider yourself a journalist, when you post information on the Internet, chances are good if it's on a hot topic, it'll spread. So it's everyone's responsibility to check facts and be selective with the information we share or reshare.