Twitter & Political Agendas

By now we’ve all come to appreciate just how valuable tool twitter is. What is rarely discussed is just how easy it is to abuse it; anyone can use it to spread lies and half-truths with little fear of exposure.

To prove just how easy and effective a disinformation tool twitter can, a journalist in the US created a account called “Inthestimulus” and used it to spread out-right lies about Obama’s stimulus package.

At first his posts were believable but un-sourced lies and then slowly built up to the ridiculous. Within the first day, he had quickly attached hundreds of users. By the end he had thousands of followers.

What was interesting about this incident is that not that Twitter could be used for disinformation, like any open network its open for manipulation by anyone with an agenda, but that people can get away with no citations and be taken as a serious source of information.

The danger of citizen journalism

More often then not, the first pictures from most major news story come from everyday people. The mumbai attacks in India, the crashing of a plane in the Hudson river, etc. Members of the public in the right place at the right time. Most people celebrate this organic form of journalism without considering the dangers involved.

Ask yourself, who is responsible for the risks taken by citizen journalists who become ‘accidental’ reporters in dangerous situations? Traditional journalists are usually offered some kind of protection; ordinary people aren’t. They don’t have any kind of news organisation or union of journalists to fight for them or condemn actions taken against them.

Take the example of the bloggers in China who raised the scandal of poor building standards after the earthquake last year. They broke the story, put pressure on the authorities and appeared to open up Chinese society. Six months later when the world was looking elsewhere, a number of them were arrested and more restrictions were put on Chinese bloggers

The Great Firewall of…Kazakhstan?

Kazakhstan, while not exactly not China it’s hardly a country where press freedom is firmly established. In recent years, blogging has exploded in the former Soviet republic and has helped open up the country to a western audience.

Recently the country proposed a number of laws that many view as a way for its government to crack down on Kazakhstan’s burgeoning blogosphere. Its bloggers are afraid that this law will be used to eliminate all kinds of dissent online.

For many, the Internet represent the latest bastion of free expression and thought in the modern world, and yet across the actions being prosed by the Kazakhstan’s government is being repeated across the globe, even in parts of the world where free expression is suppose to be paramount.

If it’s on the Interweb, it must be true ;)

Too often people take it for granted that what they read online is the truth. The ultimate personification of this being, of course, Wikipedia. Recently, a comment piece in the Guardian a highlighted this; it seems that a number of journalists were caught out when they decided to pop on to the site and get some quick background material for their obituary pieces on Maurice Jarre.

It turns out though that a number of quotes attributed the composer on Wikipedia which where picked up and used by said journalists, had simply been made up by a UCD student turning to prove a point about the realities of using a reference that is freely editable by virtually anyone in cyberspace.

Sigh, yet another Twitter post…

There’s no getting away from it, Twitter’s here to stay. The fact that even the Irish Times is twittering just shows how far it has come.

As Trudi notes on her blog, within minutes of the outcome of the murder trial – David Bourke vs The Attorney General – the verdict was broken by The Irish Times via Twitter. An hour later, a link to an article about the trial was post on the social network.

Her point is that news moves at such an astounding rate, and sites like Twitter allow journalists to instantly get the latest news to their audience. But is there a danger in this?

Already many mistakes are made by news outlets in their rush to out-scoop one another; what is to be the likely result if rather then having the time – hours or minutes – between editions or bulletins to compete against one another to break a story, that instead news groups only have seconds.

Who needs a notepad anymore?

N93

There was a time when a notepad was a journalist’s best friend. Then it was a tape recorder/Dictaphone. What will it be next? Probably the mobile phone.

Take for example the N93; on paper a it’s a regular 3G mobile but the reality is that it can take very high quality still and video photos, downloads any Web page you want, produces copy on Microsoft Word, record in digital audio, and phone anywhere in the world, for free, on Skype.

The N93 is Nokia’s latest attempt to pack the whole technology world into a pocket-sized package, and that it can allow journalists to do almost everything they need in a single device could begin a revolution.

At this stage in the technology’s development, the Nokia N93 is not yet the perfect solution. There are still many incidents when a bulky camera, a powerful computer or a sophisticated digital audio unit is needed but the time will likely come when all a journalist needs is there mobile in one hand and a micro-keyboard in the other.

Google & Journalists – Best friend/worst enemy?

Recently Google developed a new search tool called Google News Timeline; it’s a system that not only allows the user to better refine their searches, by time/date for example, but it also lets them search for items in a variety of different categories such as news, news quotes, newspapers, magazines, etc…

For example, as Leah Murray points out on her blog it could act as an important resource tool for journalists and/or researchers:

say one wanted to find newspaper reports of the September 11 plane attacks in New York. Simply typing September 11 2001 doesn’t bring that many results, or irrelevant results back. Adding the words ‘attacks’ and searching under news allows one to find numerous results and then the option to refine the material presented.

- Leah Murray

Twitter – Another nail in the coffin

Hudson Plane Crash

Can serious journalism really be limited to 140 characters? Apparently so. What started out as a social networking and micro-blogging site, Twitter has quickly ballooned into an all together another beast; from such humble beginnings, it has rapidly develop into the world’s latest newswire service.

But why has it become so successful? Three reasons:

It’s fast: In a world where increasingly audiences are looking for instant gratification, news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news bulletins as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.

It’s two-way: Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation. Like its new media brethren, blogs, Twitter encourages discourse and feedback.

It fills a void: Twitter is built for the new news cycle. Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds.

Print 2.0

The Kindle

What’s the best size for a newspaper? Broadsheet, Berliner, tabloid? How about palm size?

In a world where newspapers are failing due to their former readers finding new information avenues, the Hearst Corporation is backing a new larger-format e-reader, aimed at delivering something closer to a traditional newspaper layout than is available on current e-readers.

Given the evolving state of the technology, the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video. Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly. There’s even speculation it may be foldable or at least flexible.

Anonymity, not so anonymous anymore.

Journalistic Kiwi's day out

Here’s a post from journalistic kiwi that peaked my interest. Ode to the Letters page highlighted the case of a student in the US, who receive death threats (which ultimately lead to the girl and her family moving away) after she had made a post on her MySpace page about how much she hated her home town.

The wasn’t the fact that she post such a topic on MySpace that caused the uproar, rather the fact that her post was published in the town’s local paper. It seems that someone saw her post and then sent it to the paper, the girl herself had no involvement with this.

This incident clearly highlights the danger of the “public domain” and the ignorance, for the lack of a better word, many users of such networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.