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TWEETING THE NEWS

Twitter has often been called the next frontier in journalism. During the recent Mumbai attacks, on-the-spot citizen journalists breathlessly tweeted minute-by-minute updates alongside photos snapped on their mobile phones. It seemed that Twitter might be able to rival big media organisations such as the BBC in tracking and broadcasting news as it happens.

Sitting in The Economist’s London offices on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, my colleagues and I noticed a thick black plume of smoke billowing across London’s sky. We speculated at some length as to what and where it might be--maybe Smiths of Smithfield was enjoying an extra-large barbecue to celebrate the advent of spring and became a bit too enthusiastic with the lighter fluid.

Ever-vigilant journalists that we are, we trawled the internet for more conclusive evidence. The BBC, SkyNews, CNN were all silent--even the Transport for London site was mum on the subject.

And then our office tweeter suggested we check Twitter. We typed in “London fire” and sure enough a plethora of tweets appeared on our screens. The problem was that most of them simply re-worded what we were already saying. Such frantic tweets as “Fire in London? WTF?”, “LONDON’s on FIRE!”, “What’s this I hear about a fire in London!?” and “No smoke without fire... Can anyone else see that smoke in central London?” offered little in the way of illumination.

A few narrowed it down to “somewhere near Holborn” and then to Chancery Lane, and a couple of them managed to mention the Breams Building, where the fire had indeed broken out. But in terms of accurate news or even on-the-ground reporting, Twitter came up short. The top of my screen kept telling me that 16 new tweets had been posted in the last seven seconds, but each time I refreshed the page I saw more of the same: “big fire in london…smokey!”

More information appeared only when the tweets started offering links to the BBC and SkyNews articles. Twitter’s users gloated that they had beaten the mainstream media by at least an hour in reporting the news of the fire. (One user gloated: “Twitter's coverage of the fire in holborn, london seems to be much better than mainstream media".) But if much of the substance of this “coverage” came from details supplied by the mainstream media, is it really time to crow?

Had more of these enthusiastic tweeters bothered to go the site of the fire, such exultation might be more justified. That isn't to say that top news agencies don't take shortcuts (the BBC article ended with the line "A BBC staff member based in Henry Wood House near Oxford Street said she can see smoke in the sky from her office”). But the employed journalists had at least managed to find out what building was in fact on fire and just how many firefighters were involved.

Twitter has its uses. You can follow the minutiae of a variety of celebrities’ lives, from Stephen Fry to Sean “Diddy” Combs. There's also plenty of inappropriately intimate details about regular people, and opportunities to track the performance of a Mozart opera. You can even learn the results of criminal trials in real time. But Twitter is not yet a reliable go-to website for unfolding news.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I can hear shouts outside our office window. There seem to be seven or eight people demonstrating in the street below. Perhaps someone nearby knows what's going on …

~ JOSIE DELAP

Picture Credit: Robert Scoble (via Flickr)