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Brian

Is new media just serving us bullshit faster than old media?

By March 1, 2010No Comments2 min read

So this really chaps my ass, when I see a single tweet, a whopping 140 characters of consciousness, expanded into 2,476 characters of pure speculation. Yeah that’s right, TechCrunch managed to just explode one tweet by Alex Payne of twitter into an entire blog post without bothering to verify anything first. Not only did techcrunch writer MG Siegler operate the engine of this speculation train, he managed to drag Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider onto it as a passenger. Henry in this case is no victim as he just paraphrased/quoted MG on his post.

So all this, a total of close to 3700 characters spawned from an innocent 140 characters. (Not counting the comments in each place, or this rant right here) So are we really getting a revolution in journalism? Or just half-assed journalism of old delivered faster? Do we really need to sensationalize EVERY tweet and turn it all into “news” ?

The best response though comes from one of the comments posted on SAI
“this article, and its headline, are bullshit. gruber nails it: https://twitter.com/gruber/statuses/9806432443

I can’t wait until someone like Eric Schmidt tweets out “felt good dumping all that stuff” and people assume he is dumping google stock and all hell breaks loose.

So call me a hypocrite if you like for posting 1400 characters about this, but in this case I’m commenting on the “reporters” writers, not the actual tweet. I personally can’t wait for an upgraded API & website from twitter.