Comments on: Revolutionary Twits Redux

By: …My heart’s in Accra » Madagascar: new government, old tensions

…My heart’s in Accra » Madagascar: new government, old tensions — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:27:02 +0000

[...] Twitter by Malagasy friends to report events on the ground in a blogpost a few weeks back, and got gentle but firm pushback from Paul Currion at humanitarian.info, who noted that most of these posts were Twitter users reposting reporting they’d heard on [...]

By: Green Design » Blog Archive » Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” In Moldova

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:58:46 +0000

[...] those of us following the situation from off the island clung to Twitter for current information – though much of the information we got was from broadcasts on radio or television within the country, that information wasn’t available outside Madagascar, and Twitter made it possible to get [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” in Moldova

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:46:19 +0000

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:12:27 +0000

Ethan – thanks for the clarification. This raises the question “what is journalism?” since listening to the radio and television is not – generally speaking – considered the bedrock of journalistic work. If a professional journalist relied on that for their reporting, we would rightly excoriate them – and one of the trends that has undermined journalism in the last decade has been exactly that. The most visible example is some of the reporting from Iraq that never stepped outside the Green Zone; but also the type of “churnalism” reported in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News. This descent of journalism makes it easier for people to pick up on (for example) Twitter reporting and say “hey, here’s something that looks like journalism!”

In the humanitarian context, what worries me about about this trend is that we already have enough problems reporting on humanitarian issues. This is partly due to insecure environments, but also due to lazy journalism (there are few journalists with a solid understanding of the humanitarian sector, despite its size and “importance”). The current trend is going to take us further away from decent coverage of these issues, and that worries me.

By: Alanna

Alanna — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:06:35 +0000

I think journalism is the raw material that blogs draw upon, too. Neither twittering nor blogging is journalism in any true sense – at least not often.

And I agree with you; twitter is not much of a tool for humanitarian crises. It’s unreliable, it’s public, and it’s chaotic, among other things.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:54:45 +0000

Without journalism, people would have nothing to “Tweet” about.

By: EthanZ

EthanZ — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:10:50 +0000

I agree with your general point – much of the news reported on twitter and blogs is derivative of mainstream media. In this case, my point was slightly different – during the struggle for power in Antananarivo, government and anti-government forces controlled different radio and television stations. It required quite a bit of journalistic work to watch and listen to the news and intepret the movements of the various factions, which our Malagasy friends were doing. They were then using Twitter to get messages to the Madagascar editor of Global Voices, who posted detailed reports. So while I accept the larger point, this isn’t the best example… more a reflection on something I wasn’t suficiently clear about in my post.