Following The Mumbai Mayhem On Twitter, And The Role of Twitter In Breaking News
Since the news of the Mumbai attacks first broke yesterday afternoon, I have been switching between live video streams on Indian news channels CNN-IBN and NDTV. I have also been closely following the #mumbai room on Twitter, new tweets are coming in at a furious pace. There’s an ongoing idealogical debate on whether Twitter is a real source of news, especially with the backdrop of the unfortunate terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The tweets are a mix of people expressing their opinion, relaying conversations with friends and family in Mumbai, repeating what they’re seeing on TV, and lot of retweeting. So even though the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is pretty low, and hard to tell facts from rumors and speculation, Twitter is still a key source of real-time update aggregation to stay on top of all the news.
While a majority of big media organizations have already developed or acquired a citizen journalism platform, #mumbai room on Twitter was where all the action was yesterday and given Twitter’s adoption that’s not going to change anytime soon. So to all big media companies betting big on Citizen Journalism - it’s hard to change consumer behavior, so hoping users will come directly to you and provide news and assets is hoping for a bit much. Full credit to CNN TV in covering the Mumbai terror events - without waiting for assets to flow into iReport.com, it was apparent that CNN staffers were actively monitoring the twitter streams yesterday and in fact invited some active twitter users to speak on TV from Mumbai.
I was speaking with a WSJ blogger last week, right after the Motrin incident on Twitter, about the relevance and significance of Twitter. In his daily quest for breaking news, he said he’s now closely monitoring Twitter - following several people on Twitter and keeping a close eye on trending topics. The stream of data on Twitter is just that (raw data), and it’s upto the mainstream media given their resources and creditworthiness to mine this data and filter the signal from noise.
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