Monday, May 11, 2015

The Transformation of Twitter into a Credible News Source

Before you dive into this blog, I want you to ask yourself this question—When was the last time you remember watching the news? Most teenagers and young adults may ponder hard when asked this question, because I know I did. While in the United States it is rare to find someone who is not on social media. In this day and age, one often looks to social media, in particular Twitter, for recent and popular news. It is quite interesting because Twitter was first used to discuss opinions and feelings toward pictures and other tweets. Clearly things have changed. Twitter has grown from revealing feelings, pictures, and weather, to becoming an important and reliable news source. Barry Ritholtz remembers the story like it was yesterday. He says, “Someone in the office yelled, two explosions at the Boston marathon, may be terrorist! Within seconds, there were first-hand reports, photos, even video circulating. Not on CNN or Reuters or Associated Press. On Twitter.” Today, the convenience of being able to check Twitter for current news has been the reason for the decrease of youths partaking in the traditional way of receiving news.





The Origin Of Twitter 

No one could have imagined how far twitter would come since popping up in the social media scene 9 years ago. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone created the application Twitter. The group worked at a podcasting company called Odeo Inc. in San Francisco, California. They were working on a microblog site, which is a blog of frequent and short posts. They also wanted another way to send messages through their cell phone. After long weeks of hard work, the platform was finally created. Jack, one of the creators, sent the first tweet saying, “just setting up my twttr,” little did he know, that was the uprising of their company. As soon as celebrities and popular companies started using the application, the site reached fame.

Twitter soon became more than a place for expressing feelings, and discussing your day to friends and tweeters —it has changed media, politics and business. As Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, says “This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.” You will find that many people first hear news on Twitter, such as natural disasters, sport scores, famous deaths, and many more. Twitter has also changed political news and communication in many ways. In the past, it was usually only a select few of people reporting political news. Mainly those who were intertwined in the business. Unlike the past, now we see politicians and even ordinary people tweet their political opinions. In this new age of Twitter anyone has the power to feel like a journalist, as they may tweet anything that comes to mind or is important to them.

Twitter is the New Online Newspaper

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The youth and young adults of this decade may not go out their way to watch the news or even buy a newspaper, because there is social media around. People rely on social media for current news, in particular, Twitter. According to the Huffington Post, Twitter is the "21st Century newspaper". That is what makes twitter so amazing. You can do so many things on the platform and find out alot of news from a wide variety of different sources. Twitter's made a clear difference and reached separation far ahead from actual newspapers and other social media accounts because twitter allows you to hear stories through first person of view. Unlike how newspapers stories are usually spread through second hand views. For example, the most recent Baltimore Riot in 2015. On twitter one would see videos uploaded from people off the streets at the Riot, giving the twitter community a a first person point of view of what's really going on.

How fast news spreads through twitter benefits the idea of twitter becoming a modern newspaper. The power of retweets, will forever lead twitter to success. A retweet is a repost or forward a message posted by another user.One retweet of someone's tweet from one side of the country can become popular and even reach the views of others on Twitter from other countries. Hashtags are also similar. Hashtags allow one to see every tweet ever created that mentioned the exact words that are being hashtagged. Trending Topics and List on Twitter also play a role in the rapid spread of news. Those two tools are powerful for investors, journalist and traders. The Trending Topic tool on Twitter allows one to see what news is popular on the Twitter platform, whether it's sports scores, product stocks or even celebrity deaths. While the List tool allows one to specifically select topics in which they want to categorize in sections, so they can view them at all times. Investors and traders use the Trending Topics page most often to view what stocks are rising and decreasing to further benefit their benefit. While journalist often use both tools to choose what topics are important enough for them to write about.These features contribute to twitter becoming an online newspaper.

Examples of Twitter Spreading News

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Twitter seems to have been very reliable in spreading news. When Osama Bin Laden was murdered, guess where it was heard first… Twitter. The word of his death was tweeted before President Obama even got to give his official press conference. The message was tweeted by Keith Urbahn, a staff member of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. His tweet was then retweeted by his followers, and so on resulting in a rapid spread of news.

Another example of a story that circulated first on Twitter was the New York plane crash in 2009. In January of 2009, US Airways flight 1549, hit a flock of geese not too long after departing the airport. Hitting the geese caused the planes engine to stall. The pilot calmly directed the plane to the nearest body of water, which happened to be the Hudson River. Jim Hanrahan, who was watching the whole time, tweeted about the event as soon as it happened. He tweeted, “I just watched a plane crash in the Hudson.” This tweet soon followed with images of the crash. This tweet was made a full fifteen minutes before the mainstream media outlets got the chance to cover it.

Concluding Twitter's Transformation


Considering the origin of Twitter, one would never guess what the platform would develop into. The transformation from expressing feelings to delivering news became essential in the journalism market. Journalists now embrace Twitter as a new source for gathering information. News outlets use Twitter to spread news, market stories, and reach out to news consumers. Twitter’s convenient platform also allows it to be the prominent partner for news with its features “retweet” and “hashtag.” Those features allow the news to spread faster throughout the web because it allows others to see the tweet even if they're not following the person who created the original tweet. Twitter can even be compared to a broadcast by the way its simple tweets become breaking news feeds. There's no saying what the future of Twitter holds. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes the future of Journalism.





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