My old friend Michael Harris, who is the visiting chair in journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, noted in passing during a recent CBC interview that reporters can’t do meaningful journalism on Twitter. He said that journalism involves detailed story telling and nuance, and there is no detail or nuance on Twitter. I agree. I think Twitter can be fun and useful at times, especially as a tool for transmitting little bits of information or pointing us to information elsewhere. However, journalists who Twitter shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that Twittering has very much to do with the work we do.
Twitter is essentially a headline service. The word count of a Tweet – 140 characters or less – is about the word count of a headline and subhead in a newspaper. Headline writing is a art, and one that often falls short, causing misinterpretation of stories. Most of the complaints that come into newsrooms are about headlines that do not reflect the content of a story. Tweet all day and you’ve just published a newspaper without the content.
Twittering falls into the category of great distraction for reporters who are hard pressed for time to do real work. Reporting is hard work. In my experience, reporters will do anything to avoid it. Pretending that Twittering is work is a classic distraction for reporters who need to get at the real job at hand.
Twitter is low impact. Ask yourself how many people are you reaching with your Tweets? How memorable are they? Are you talking to the public at large, or to your friends. If I write a newspaper story, I want it to be read and remembered by tens of thousands of people. I want people to clip it and put it on their desks, to paste it in scrapbooks, to call me and tell me I’m brilliant, or a complete jerk. I’m not sure this is the case for Tweets. No one is being moved by a Tweet, except maybe to marvel at how clever you are. Your Tweets are relevant to the small group of people who read your notes. When I told my 19 year old son the other day about a contest on Twitter that he might be interested in, he replied, “what’s Twitter?” He is a musician and a full-time cook and has a very full life by the way.
You might say I’m just old school, that I need to get with it. No doubt this is true. But my concerns about Twitter journalism reflect my concerns about the future of professional story tellers. Writing is a serious business. Tweets are trivial. We need writers, and journalists to be applying all their energy and brains to what we do, which is to tell stories. The stories will be the salvation of the journalism business.
Last night a friend lent me a book of essays by the great essayist Joan Didion. She begins the opening essay in the book in this way: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual expreience.”
We can’t Tweet stories, and it is the stories that we need in order to live. The Tweets we can live without.
Amen, brother.
-b
Philip, here’s the rebuttal you invited me to post after our e-mail exchange.
First, I had a hand in raising Michael Harris’s ire when I did a workshop for the same student editors he spoke to later in the day. My topic was online journalism, including Twitter, and at one point I told them, “In online journalism, the only deadline is right now.” (By this I meant the presses don’t roll every 24 hour online, and the newscast doesn’t air every hour: when a story, properly reported and written, is finished and edited, it can be posted at any time. And breaking news can be reported instantly.)
One of the editors repeated this line to Michael, and he in turn quoted it, disapprovingly, during the CBC interview (without naming me). What Michael may not have known is that I also told the editors that online tools such as Twitter are no substitutes for the good, old-fashioned journalism you describe. (In effect, he “tweeted” my remarks without context.)
But quality journalism and Twitter are not mutually exclusive, either, and this is where I take issue with your post, which seems to imply they are.
As you point out, Twitter can offer headlines or links. It can also bring in other views, and allow journalists to engage their audience. I share some of your skepticism about citizen journalism, but nor do I think we can wall ourselves off from our civic-minded readers and listeners. Twitter is one way (emphasis: one way) to engage. Twitter is also mobile. Install it on a mobile device and you can “live-tweet” from a news event during downtime. It lets you make use of that dead time, such as riding in a taxi, waiting between scrums at the Legislature. And once in a while, you can even be eloquent or contextual in a tweet, which, after all, is roughly the same length as a haiku.
You call Twitter “low-impact” and ask how many people a journalist reaches. I have 500 followers and counting — and I dare say, given circulation woes and ratings figures, it is a rare newspaper or radio story in New Brunswick that reaches, and moves, your ideal of tens of thousands of people. I value and always strive to produce the kind of journalism you describe, but well-crafted narrative or context are not the only attributes of good journalism. Sometimes we must meet our audience where they are by giving them news when they want it (now, or more accurately as soon as we can, properly sourced and confirmed) in the format they want it.
My main point however is to repeat what I told the student editors: blogs and tweets do not do the job themselves. This is why I continue to do investigative work and long features, and push institutions for accountability, for CBC — getting to “the real job at hand” as you put it. But if Twitter can complement that work, why not join the conversation?
Coincidentally, there was a fine example this week of how a credible, dedicated, intelligent, “old-media” operation can take advantage of Twitter to win a big victory for openness, free speech and journalism:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook?commentpage=1
I think Twitter is more of mean than it is an end. However, I don’t think that makes it “trivial”. I’ve found out about many interesting stories through the service, and not just in headline form. I read stories of the Iranian election through twitter that I never would have found through the Telegraph-Journal or the Globe and Mail. I also found out about Carter-Ruck’s attempt to muzzle the reporting of Parliament, as Jacques pointed out.
I don’t think any journalist will ever exclusively use a 140 character limit to report stories. I do think though that some very interesting real-time reporting can occur through such a medium.
I’m not a journalist, and I have no idea what actually goes into writing and filing a story for a newspaper. I do consume news, and I do enjoy finding out what is going on half a world away as it happens. Twitter is what it is, it will not replace traditional news, but I think it can do very much to complement it.
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