[Infowarrior] - Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists

[Richard Forno]

Behind the News, The News Frontier — November 06, 2009 11:14 AM Fort  
Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists
In the aftermath of violence, lists suggest the benefits of  
collaboration

By Megan Garber

http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/fort_hood_a_first_test_for_twi.php

Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to  
determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg  
relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom  
during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when  
journalists—mostly barred from shoe-leather reporting and other, more  
traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of  
social-media editors. In the dizzying tumult of reporting-by-proxy,  
mainstream media discovered what Web-native journalism has always  
taken for granted: that journalism tends to become richer, more  
compelling, and generally better when it is the result of collaboration.

We saw this again yesterday, after an Army major named Nidal Malik  
Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and  
injuring thirty. Only, this time, added to the real-time coverage of  
the shootings was a new mechanism for breaking-news updates: Twitter  
lists. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, news outlets from  
The New York Times to The Huffington Post to The Today Show created  
lists that aggregated the Twitter feeds of, among others, national  
breaking-news sources (CNN, the AP), official sources (the U.S. Army,  
the Red Cross, the office of Texas governor Rick Perry), local news  
organizations, and local individuals.

The lists—which offer a running stream of information, updates, and  
commentary from the aggregated feeds—represent a vast improvement over  
the previous means of following breaking news in real time. In place  
of free-for-all hashtags—which, valuable as they are in creating an  
unfiltered channel for communication, are often cluttered with  
ephemera, re-tweets, and other noise—they give us editorial order. And  
in place of dubious sources—users who may or may not be who they say  
they are, and who may or may not be worthy of our trust—the lists  
instead return to one of the foundational aspects of traditional  
newsgathering: reliable sources. Lists locate authority in a Twitter  
feed’s identity—in, as it were, its brand: while authority in  
hashtagged coverage derives, largely but not entirely, from the twin  
factors of volume and noise—who tweets the most, who tweets the loudest 
—authority in list-ed coverage derives from a tweeter’s prior record.  
Making lists trustworthy in a way that hashtagged coverage simply is  
not.

Lists, of course, whose architecture mimics Twitter’s ‘stream-of- 
news,’ real-time information flow, still feature Twitter’s trademark  
cognitive deluge: “I’m finding Twitter’s small factoids on Ft. Hood to  
be torturous,” the Minnesota-based blogger Bob Collins tweeted last  
night. “Think I’ll just pick up the Times tomorrow and take mine with  
context.” But they also, New Media Landscape-wise, increase reporters’  
ability to provide that very context. As the Times reporter Michael  
Luo put it last night: “Seeing various Ft Hood locals who were  
tweeting abt shooting being contacted by reporters. Digital form of  
pack journalism.”

But they also represent a new—or, more precisely, a newly facilitated— 
way for news organizations to collaborate: they allow news outlets  
essentially to co-opt others’ reporting. But in a good way—to the  
benefit of the news organizations in question and, of course, their  
audiences. So The New York Times gets to provide its users real-time  
information from Waco’s NewsChannel 25—and NewsChannel 25, in turn,  
gets to have its reporting amplified to the readers of the paper of  
record. Win and win. (And, taking the audience into account: win again.)

And while, sure, in the immediate sense, lists narrow the  
‘democratization of information’—those who followed Twitter lists got  
a less freewheelingly diverse treatment of the shootings than did  
those who followed the #FortHood hashtag—still, in the longer-term  
sense, the lists actually expand the democratizing aspects of  
micromessaging. They empower Twitter as a media platform, helping  
users to find, per the increasingly apt metaphor, the signal in the  
noise. Yes, there was overlap and redundancy in yesterday’s coverage— 
the “Fort Hood” lists all generally contained the same local news  
outlets, the same official sources, etc.—but, then, that’s the case  
whenever different media outlets cover the same events. And while  
cable outlets were filling their air with equal parts information and  
speculation, Twitter lists were tempering conjecture with the wisdom- 
of-crowds brand of mediation that is built into their multi-channel  
approach.

It’s what we saw with the Iran coverage—cross-platform, cross-outlet  
curation—only more streamlined. And more institutionalized. And, in  
some ways, more meaningful. As Mashable’s Adam Ostrow put it,

What’s really interesting here from a media perspective is that we’re  
seeing news organizations that compete vigorously for breaking news  
turning to real-time curation to help tell the story. And the result  
is certainly a win for media consumers – rather than searching far and  
wide for local news from Fort Hood, it’s all being aggregated for us  
by news organizations we trust. It certainly might be a glimpse of  
what’s to come from the Twitter Lists feature.
I agree. But I’d also take it a step farther. What we saw play out  
yesterday wasn’t just about the Twitter lists as a general feature; it  
was about Twitter lists as a general future. Which is to say: it was  
about what Twitter lists suggest for all media.

One of the core elements that has defined journalism, essentially  
since the first newspapers sprang up in the 17th century, has been  
competition—and with it, implicitly, the assumption that news is a  
commodity that news outlets are in a race to capture, create, package,  
sell. The Web has been utterly disruptive to that dynamic—not merely  
because it has changed the atomic infrastructure of news and its  
consumption, but also because it has, in more logistical terms, merged  
media platforms that used to be physically separate. “The Internet”  
is, in its way, a one-stop news shop; and through, in particular, the  
deceptively simple innovation that is the hyperlink, news outlets are  
increasingly defined by connection rather than separation. (Thus, the  
“Web.”) And that, in turn—fundamentally, if not completely—topples the  
competitive underpinnings of newsgathering as a profession. Do what  
you do best, and link to the rest.

Twitter lists suggest the institutionalization of this connected  
mentality, a kind of rudimentary codification of the media’s  
increasing openness to—and reliance upon—collaboration. They suggest  
the myriad benefits of cross-pollination. Even at this nascent stage,  
they represent, simultaneously, both the collapse and the expansion of  
the journalistic brand—and the recognition that, increasingly, brands  
are at their strongest when their owners prove willing to weaken them.