Business | Features
Twitter makes news, or is it idle chatter?
Let me tell you about Steve Lange. Steve is a father of four in New Mexico. He likes yoga, horses and dogs, and ghost hunting. Now, I've never met Steve. Everything I've just written is all taken from information he posted on his Twitter account: twitter.com/LangeFamily.
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Reporter
- Published: 23:07 May 8, 2009
Let me tell you about Steve Lange. Steve is a father of four in New Mexico. He likes yoga, horses and dogs, and ghost hunting. Now, I've never met Steve. Everything I've just written is all taken from information he posted on his Twitter account: twitter.com/LangeFamily.
How do I even know that Steve exists? Apparently, he likes to "tweet" about events, such as the swine flu outbreak. His rather snarky comments, which included lines about hiding in shopping malls (a la Day of the Dead) to avoid any ongoing pandemic caught the attention of two reporters at Bloomberg, Pat Wechsler and John Helyar.
The reporters didn't actually make Steve the focus of the story, but instead used his comments to illustrate what type of things people were saying online at the start of the swine flu outbreak, which made for some interesting reading.
The story had one weird point. It said that Steve couldn't be reached for comment. Think about that. A reporter called a person to comment on his comment on Twitter. Now, the journalistic part of me knows that this was also part of an attempt to find out if Steve actually exists and wasn't instead a John, Mack or even a Stephanie who gets her kicks from playing other people online. Hey, it happens. A lot.
According to the story, Steve did not return the reporter's calls. I don't blame him. If I knew reporters where trying to contact me about a comment I'd made about the end of the world, I'd be hiding too.
But I let the whole thing go, assuming that I was just over-thinking things. Out of curiosity, I went back to Steve's Twitter page to see what else he'd written.
I was surprised to discover that Steve had also exchanged a few terse words with Melissa Gilbert, who was better know as Laura Ingalls on the '70s television show Little House on the Prairie (twitter.com/MelissaEGilbert).
Again, I assume these "tweets" are actually from Ms Gilbert, and, apparently over 5,000 people are also taking that on faith. Drawn in by the weirdness, I started to read Ms Gilbert's tweets, which included a message about the recent death of actor Dom DeLuise.
What was really weird was that this tweet was turned into news - by CNN, according to the tweets that followed. I wasn't able to confirm this myself, but spent some time looking around online and you will see some news agencies using what people post on Twitter as the basis for a story.
Sometimes that's OK, such as in the case of Mr Wechsler and Helyer. But I know we're all really excited by this new technology called Twitter, and a number of us - me included - have spent a fair amount of time writing about it, but a celebrity tweeting about the death of another celebrity isn't news. This is gossip, and passing it off as news is just lazy journalism.
Now, that doesn't mean that Twitter - or any other social network - shouldn't be used as source of news. The Mumbai bombing showed us just how powerful a tool it can be, but we need to draw a line between news and idle chatter.
More from Business Features
More from Business
Business Editor's choice
-
DFSA chief to step down in September
Executive has been at post since 2008
-
Geepas idea blossomed in Dubai
The journey led from a small shop in Bahrain to a $1.27b company in the UAE
