I noted a similar thought from ESPN writer Don Van Natta Jr., who said: “My 70-year-old mother gets all her news from the morning newspaper. She thinks NBC’s Olympics coverage is swell.”
Where did I find Van Natta’s thought? On Twitter, of course.
Back in 2009 and into 2010, journalists who were glued to Twitter were outliers. But today, if a journalist is not spending a good portion of his day on Twitter, he is either unconscious or not near a WiFi hot spot. And journalists — I’m guilty as charged — are increasingly turning to the site as a snappy way to see what the American People are thinking about. William Dutton, a professor of Internet studies at Oxford, has called the rise of networked individuals and the Twitterati the “Fifth Estate.”
As Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told me, “Journalists find Twitter to be a really effective, fascinating and even thrilling way of tracking conversation and tracking news.”
It’s right at our desks — and journalists, especially this one, are nothing if not general haters of being outdoors. It’s easy to search. And Twitter users are frequently angry about some slight or another, which provides conflict-in-a-box. Start-ups such as Storify have produced apps that even let journalists turn tweets into stories. Twitter is the new man-on-the-street, seemingly solving a problem journalists have struggled with since the days of the penny press: How do we figure out what America is thinking?
Some big mainstream stories have gained significant traction on Twitter, including the Arab Spring and the controversy over Planned Parenthood funding from the Susan G. Komen breast cancer group. But other stories — ones that probably don’t reflect what most of America is thinking about — are turning up more often in mainstream outlets.
The #NBCFail drama is one example. The renewed vigor with which the media seem to be covering presidential candidates’ gaffes is another. There should be a new word for the look on the faces of non-Twitter users when they are asked about a controversy on the site. I propose “twerplexed.”
And even though most of America isn’t paying attention, mainstream news outlets are increasing their reliance on Twitter. This newspaper tracks references to political candidates on Twitter using something it calls @MentionMachine. This past week, Twitter introduced its Twitter Political Index, which uses tweets to measure sentiment about President Obama and Mitt Romney, as if the very small subset of Americans who tweet — and tweet about politics — could tell us anything meaningful about the presidential race.
I like the way Rosenstiel put it: “If Twitter was a meaningful predictor of voter behavior, Ron Paul would be the Republican nominee.”
America is still disconnected.
Michael S. Rosenwald, a Washington Post reporter, writes the blog Rosenwald, Md.
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