NEVER TWEET

By: Tamar Belfont

It’s not a shocker that Twitter is playing a massive role in the news these days. Many Presidential candidates get coverage trading barbs through Twitter. Many news outlets often tweet first, then post online to other sites then print. In today society, our current president of the United States keeps everyone update and connected with him via Twitter. President Trumps makes all his big announcements on social sites and Twitter is his well known one. Twitter a safe zone for many news outlets. Twitter’s biggest impact on news coverage is reporters make minute-by-minute decisions on what they publish and who reads it versus the old days when a small group of editiors held that power over what went into the next day’s paper. Twitter can post any thing without any actual fact check. Therfore, it makes it hard for many readers to understand the truth versus the false. Twitter is a free-will site. For example, a fake account can publish anything on their account containing the news and it is up to society and journalist to distinguish the truth from the fake.

Twitter also gives nespapers more immediacy. For example, according to Craig Chambelain “ When a gunman started shooting at a Colorado movie theather, The Denver Post’s first 24 hours of coverage was broken sololey on social media plateforms like Twitter because the print edition was already on the delivery trucks.” Twitter sometimes tends to out beat us when it comes down to publishing news. Twitter does not do actual fact checks but instead post their opinion and news to the world. Twitter does not follow nor have the same rules that apply to journalist before publishing news worthy information.

Twitter can give journalist a chance to expand on their jobs. When you hear someone going to school for journalism, your first instant is their going to be a reporter or writer but instead Twitter expanded their traditional jobs. An Atlanta editor gained 500 news followers for the Journal- Constitution when she tweets about her favorite sport figure skating and that is something the paper’s sports section had ignored. As journalist I agree we need to disengage from the daily rhythms of Twitter because Twitter can has it’s pros and cons. I perfer scrolling down Twitter and keeping on to update with the news and current events instead of reading a large spacious newspaper on the train. Twitter gets information out sometimes fastier than the New York Times, The Daily News because they don’t need an approval from an editor on their work. They just automatically post their news once they hear about it. Twitter does not care of it is false or accurate news as long as it published on the social site.