Around the Net

Last Week's Lessons In Citizen And Twttter Journalism

  • Poynter, Monday, July 23, 2012 2:07 PM

Two instances of citizen journalism last week -- the first, reporting on a less-known story about gunplay in Toronto, the second, the more widely reported massacre in Aurora, Colo. -- are further examples of how "how someone with a little time and resourcefulness can generate something journalistic about a breaking news event," writes Matthew Ingram in Gigaom.

Paraphrasing a recent post by Web developer Stijn Debrouwere about "the future of journalism," Inrgram writes "that the news business is being disrupted not just by digital forms of traditional media, or things that are recognizable as news outlets — such as The Huffington Post or Politico — but by things that don’t even look like journalism, including Reddit."

However, tweets about the development of the Aurora story -- in this case, trying to confirm whether or not the perp was a member of the Tea Party -- led to false news reports from at least one traditional news source, ABC News, according to Steve Myers.

"They should have held off reporting the supposed connections to the tea party or the Democratic Party until they had more than just a lead," writes Myers. "In the same way, I think this was the wrong time for journalists to tweet their attempts to confirm those reports. In short, it was the wrong time for process journalism."

advertisement

advertisement

>

Read the whole story at Poynter »

Next story loading loading..