Twitter: A Media Darling, and a Backlash Target

It was just about time for a Twitter backlash.

In recent months, Twitter -- a super-fast, short messaging service -- has broken the news for plane crashes, wildfires, and terrorist attacks. It hosted an international press conference in Israel, taking and answering tweets not only from reporters, but from people all around the world: “The point of this,” the Israeli Consulate tweeted, “was to hear what ppl say and to share our POV with fellow twitters.”

Since when do consulates of sovereign nations spell “people” “ppl” and share a “POV”?

Since Twitter took over the media landscape. By the time the Turkish Airlines jet crashed near Amsterdam on February 25, it was pretty much taken for granted that the news would be reported first over the messaging service.

Goodbye CNN-crawl, hello Twitter.

But while Twitter is changing the way reporters and editors have to do their jobs, it is also inspiring a round of crankiness, agita and outright backlash against the service.

The latest example: movie star Ewan MacGregor just learned that 20,000 fans had signed up to follow his every move via Twitter, in an account set up by imposters.

Twitter arrived in 2006, a marriage of micro-blogging and social networking. In the world of instant messaging, apparently even texting had become cumbersome. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wanted a way to update his friends and family on what he was doing, at any minute, via a maximum of 140 characters.

For a year, Dorsey and his friends tweeted quietly. Then, in what David Sarno, who writes a Los Angeles Times column about the Internet, calls Twitter’s unofficial coming out party, the Twitter team attended the South by Southwest Music and Media conference in Texas and found its following.

“They unveiled the service to a bunch of Web geeks,” Sarno said, “and it caught fire immediately because all the geeks were using it to tell each other where the parties were.”

The fire continues to spread. Twitter reports that its number of active users grew by 900% last year, now totaling anywhere from 4 million to 6 million people. And as the number of users grows, so too does the number of uses.

Like blogs, Twitter put people without press credentials or passwords to wire services on par with professional journalists by allowing anyone to produce and distribute media content. This makes the media more participatory and democratic, but it's also making professional journalists increasingly anxious.

Twitter is turning journalism into a “year-round Christmas newsletter,” Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times recently complained about reporters who over-tweet.

Mark McKinnon wrote acidly on the Daily Beast, “Twitter jumped the shark when, to great fanfare, members of the mainstream-media elite announced they had been baptized and would from now on be holding forth from Twitterdom, and then members of Congress Twittered President Obama's speech.”

Jon Stewart duly mocked the Congressmen on the "Daily Show" the day after President Obama’s State of the Union address, speculating on what they might be tweeting about rather than listening to the President’s speech.

 

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