I, like many others, use Twitter as a news source. Because I am a creature of convenience, I follow my favorite news outlets and am able to browse all of them in one stop. It’s amazingly efficient and I would highly recommend condensing your news surfing through Twitters!
That being said, it concerns me how frequently Twitter itself is news. Maybe it’s my secret addiction to entertainment news (I blame my mother and her insistence on watching Entertainment Tonight), but I have noticed an increasing amount of people reporting on what someone tweeted as a news story.
It’s a little weird to hear a story start, “So and so tweeted…” It’s like someone releasing a statement, if that statement was a stream of consciousness ranging anywhere from the mundane to the inappropriate.
I wish this was a trend I could see going away but I know that just isn’t the case. How often do you hear about a celebrity or pro athlete putting their foot in their mouth on Twitter? (Maybe I hear about it more because of my embarrassing habit of watching entertainment news channels…) As long as you give people the vehicle to say stupid things they will. And as long as people say stupid things, someone will make a news story out of it.