Alongside the people you’d expect to find working for a large news organisation – the crime writers, and the defence correspondents – there is a little corner of the offices at Sky News where the Twitter correspondent lives. As yet, she’s the only one of her kind.
@ruthbarnett spends her time scouring Twitter, along with the other social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr, for information that might lead her to stories. She’ll keep an eye on the trends, watching popular topics under discussion to see what’s going on – something that she mentioned in a video interview she gave today to a breakfast briefing.
The fact that Sky News has seen fit to assign someone to the full-time role of social media correspondent should show beyond doubt its importance in the mediasphere.
Of course, Ruth explained this morning, she’d never rely on a single Tweet as the sole basis of a story – but she’d say the same of a single email, or phone call. Just because the source is new, it doesn’t mean that the old journalistic rules don’t apply.
There are many people out there for whom Twitter is something of an anathema: “God, no, I don’t use it,” said one of my friends recently. “It just seems like it’s the worst possible mix between egotism and voyeurism. If I wanted that, I’d watch Big Brother.”
My seventeen-year old sister – something of a barometer for me on these matters – provided another unscientifically-sourced opinion.
“Why bother?” she said. “I don’t need to know what everyone else is up to every second of the day.” Even for an avid user of Facebook and MSN, it seems that Twitter is just one step too far.
So it might be that it’s only in the media bubble where some forms of social media are living up to the hype.
But social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is a great way for journalists and the public alike (if they’ll listen) to be aware of the moment’s breaking news. It gets information out to a wide audience with an ease and immediacy that few other media can achieve. It’s been a particularly useful source of information in a variety of situations recently that film crews and journalists haven’t been able to reach: hotel rooms in Mumbai, in the Hudson river, or – currently – at a rally in Tehran. The latter, incidentally, is why Ruth couldn’t be there in person this morning, instead having to make hourly broadcasts on the Tweets coming out of Iran.
I don’t know that we’ll be using the language that we are – TwitScoop and hashtags – in several years’ time, or even Twitter itself, Ruth said earlier. But the fact remains that social media has fundamentally changed the way we talk to each other.
This democratisation of information – and the democratisation of instant information – is something that even the most sceptical out there soon won’t be able to ignore. For the moment, Sky might be ahead of the pack. But it won’t - and shouldn’t – be long before the other outlets catch up – even if it is to the chagrin of the world’s teenagers.
