Monday, October 6, 2008

New Media and the News

As far as I know, WCCO is the only local news outlet to have a "Breaking news" twitter. I think all of the local news sites have adopted blogs by some or all of the news teams, but I have only seen twitter accounts from Jason DeRusha of WCCO and the breaking news twitter. In my opinion, this adds another dimention to the 'tip line' allowing people to 'tweet' about breaking news that is happening, and conversly allowing WCCO to monitor and react to any news that is potentially taking place.

I'm still working on my exact question(s) to ask, but I am curious on Don's opinion on weather new media is helping or hindering news. Should we keep new media/citizen journalism to the web, or should it evolve to the big screen of one of the newscasts?

In somewhat related news: CNN's iReport caused Apple stock to drop on Friday. The user submitted iReport, where anyone can post anything, "Unedited. Unfiltered. News" had a headline of Steve Jobs having health issues. The news was passed around the internet on both digg.com and twitter subsequently dropping apple's stock price 9% before the rumor could be deemed false. If we are given the opportunity to report on news, who is held accountable for the facts? Should citizen journalists hold citizen journalists accountable, should the 'trained media' hold them accountable? Will this only lead to editing and filtering of the news that is submitted? I'm asking more questions that I can answer, but I'm curious to see what will happen with user generated news/content and if the opportunites to submit will start to be limited because people can't control themselves and need to constantly push the limits.

Read more here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/04/MNIV13B9E4.DTL

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