Twitter: Helpful or Hurting Network News?

by Jared Silva -
It's understandable for TV news networks to be up-to-date with all the latest technological advanced to help promote their shows and make them even more in-depth for the viewer. One of the latest and most popular technology trends is Twitter. With little text blurbs, it can reach millions of people in seconds to get information out to others. It's great for personal use, but is it good for the newsroom? Is Twitter helping or hurting the integrity on news networks?

Twitter is a website where you have 140 characters to say anything you want, just like text messages on cellphones. The difference though between cellphone text messaging and Twitter is that while texts go from one person to another or a small group of friends if you select them, Twitter updates with every message gets sent to everybody who is "following" you. If you supposedly had 1,000 people following your "tweets," every message you update with gets sent to them instantly, and with their search feature, every single tweet is archived and can be searched by anybody. The accessibility and rising popularity of the website quickly got news stations attached to the idea of using this service as a way to get user feedback on specific news topics.

This is honestly a great, revolutionary way for news shows to get quick, almost instant feedback on anything they want to talk about, but is this just being lazy or is this just the wave of future news? Whereas before, to get user feedback from the people before Twitter, you had to interview them on the streets and there you were most likely going to get a more honest opinion from them. Now all they have to do is sit behind a computer with full anonymity other than their user alias and say whatever they want.

Twitter on news programs hasn't gotten to be too overused, but one network in particular, CNN, as gotten very close to that point. There are many, many, many examples of CNN using Twitter to get user feedback on topics of discussion and they seem to use it almost everyday as a source for people's opinions. It's gotten to the point that, from the looks of it, CNN would rather use Twitter followers as reliable opinionated sources than an actual source of information. This could be because CNN has the most followers on Twitter for news related tweets, so they would be very attached to the service.

The problem I have with this is that news used to be more personal. When you had a man on the street interview about something, you got to see the person's face and heard them talk. On Twitter, you just get anonymous replies from "whoknowswho". I can see the positives with using the service, but what makes the Twitter user's opinions credible? To use it instead of getting personal feedback is making news more boring and it's hard to associate yourself with an opinion of you have no idea where it is coming from. My overall point is that Twitter can be used for good, but it is getting overused at this point. Maybe once the next big technological breakthrough rolls around, Twitter will become obsolete. Hopefully, this new breakthrough adds more personality to the news again.