By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
It's been a particularly newsy few days in the Twitterverse, so I thought I'd do a roundup of noteworthy items.
THE NUMBERS: Founder Evan Williams wrote a blog post last week about Twitter's growth. It now has 145 million users (up from 105 million in April) - a long way from Facebook's 500 million number, but still pretty impressive. There are now almost 300,000 applications - programs that can access Twitter, create tweets, etc. Mobile users have grown 62 percent since April, and 16 percent of all new users start on a mobile device, not on a computer. And, he says, "46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience."
TWITTER BREAKS NEWS, AGAIN: Last week's breaking news situation about a gunman's entering the headquarters of Discovery Channel outside Washington, D.C., was yet another example of how news breaks on Twitter. Within minutes of the hostage situation that day, employees and others took to Twitter to tell others what they were seeing and hearing. A photo of James Jae Lee on the property was just one of many scenes that showed up on Twitter before they were seen on other forms of media.
Also, Adam Penenberg, an NYU journalism professor and author of "Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves," turned to Twitter to bring attention to a story from Mississippi. It's about $131 million in damages being awarded to the family of Brian Cole, a star prospect of the New York Mets who was killed in a Ford Explorer accident in 2001. Because no journalists covered the trial, Penenberg sent out more than 50 tweets in a two-hour period, trying to get media to understand the story.
Over the weekend, Kanye West sent out more than 70 tweets that covered a wide range of topics, including an apology to singer Taylor Swift, whose acceptance speech he interrupted during last year's MTV Video Music Awards.
"Man I love Twitter," West wrote among his myriad tweets. "I've always been at the mercy of the press but no more... The media tried to demonize me."
Mashable's Ben Parr, in a post entitled "Kanye West and How Twitter Has Changed the Way We Communicate," points out how celebrities are able to use social media, bypassing the traditional media: "Whether you think his 'stream of consciousness' is the rambling of a broken man or his most heartfelt attempt yet to put the incident behind him, you can’t help but appreciate the rawness of each tweet. There is no filter or middle man between his thoughts and the rest of the world."
LEARNING FROM MIKE WISE: Mike Wise, a Washington Post sports columnist, was suspended last week because of an ill-advised tweet. In an attempt, he said, to show that bad information can easily spread online, he made up a tweet about Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Rothlisberger. Of course, given the nature of Twitter and the fact that the tweet came from a well-known sports columnist, many people shared that information, crediting him as the source. The paper suspended him for a month. On his radio show, Wise said “I’m paying the price I should for careless, dumb behavior in the multiplatform media world.”
A journalist's reputation is on the line with every tweet, for better or worse, and people have a reasonable expectation that what's tweeted is accurate or the best information known at the moment (a point I also made in the New York Times' coverage of the Wise story). What I teach my journalism students is exactly the same: Twitter is not a toy — what you say there matters, and reflects on you and your news organization.
@JONMEDIAWEB'S CHANGE OF HEART: Jon Friedman, media columnist for Marketwatch, wrote recently about being wrong about Twitter.
"I thought it was overhyped and fairly useless," he wrote, adding that he thought Twitter and Facebook were competing social networking sites. "What won me over about Twitter was essentially the idea of becoming a part of a booming online community.
"The success of Twitter is that it gives people something they never had before — a distribution system around the world. But if it turned out this audience lost faith in Twitter or found something better, Twitter would be in trouble."
Friedman was wrong to think that Facebook and Twitter are mutually exclusive — they serve different functions and can co-exist. For now. One way to explain how they are different is this quote (often repeated often on Twitter, of course): "Facebook is for people you went to school with. Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with."
The growth of Twitter shows that we’re all becoming more connected and that word travels faster than ever. As more journalists become true believers in Twitter, they need to realize that while it can help them spread the word on their story, it can also boomerang on them if they’re not careful.
What do you think? Post your comments below or on Twitter @sreenet.
Related Columns:
- Twitter Myths and Misconceptions
Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
