3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year?
The potential of Twitter. Old-school media doesn’t get Twitter at all. A lot of people still think it’s a fad and it’s totally not a fad. Cocaine was a fad. The Osbournes were a fad. Auto-asphyxiation was a fad…. well, unless you were David Carradine. If anything I think we are just scratching the surface of Twitter for better and worse: it started breaking stories last spring and over everything else, that’s why it won’t go away. Now reporters are posting scoops on Twitter before they send the finished stories into their employers. People are not seeing what is happening here. Facebook is a social network; Twitter is a media/marketing vehicle disguised as a social network.

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of Journalism? Why?
I’m terrified. I think it’s going to hell in a hand basket. The emphasis is on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy; the newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting. Newsmakers can control stories about themselves by selectively dispersing relevant information as well as who gets to talk to them (and for what reason). And too many writers are more interested in just saying what they have to say instead of crafting the way they are saying it. It’s a comedy of errors. I thought Season 5 of The Wire painted a bleak picture of where this is going, but even David Simon couldn’t have believed that it would get this bad this fast. I would say “nervous.”

That’s more or less the good and bad of Twitter, all in two paragraphs. Twitter’s ability of breaking and spreading news is considerable. However, I think this has had its drawbacks as well, putting and onus “on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy”, as Simmons so eloquently put it.

Some have already argued that Twitter will end up killing journalism, but I think this is a gross overstatement. The sad fact is that traditional news agencies have just been unable to carve up the right strategy against Twitter’s hypernovelty. The time of solely newspapers breaking stories is over; bloggers are now getting the kind of access to information traditionally reserved for the most prestigious news outlets. Grassroots journalism is doing a better job at breaking stories and faster, because they don’t have to work with the same constraints as, say, a New York Times (validity of source, brand image concerns, writing quality, legal issues). A New York Times can’t afford running many unconfirmed stories that end up blowing up in their faces. Tweeters (and blogs) by virtue of their sheer volume, on the other hand, can. The hits outweigh the misses.

Simmons hits it right on the money when he states that “newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting.” The fact second opinion magazines like the Economist continue to see their subscriptions rise, not fall, is proof of this. Instead of focusing on WHAT has happened, it is time for traditional news outlets to return to reporting WHY something has happened.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

In the old days — like, until yesterday — movie studios judged the success of their big pictures by how much they grossed on the opening weekend. But in the age of Twitter, electronic word-of-mouth is immediate, as early moviegoers tweet their opinions on a film to millions of “followers.” Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. Friday is the new weekend.

That appears to be the lesson from the studio estimates issued on July 13 for the weekend box office. Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen docu-comedy in which an Austrian fashion journalist shoves his flamboyant gayness in the faces and other body parts of unsuspecting Americans, won the weekend with $30.4 million, a bit above most industry expectations for an R-rated provocation whose star was unknown to the mass audience until his Borat became a surprise hit in 2006, earning more than $260 million at theaters worldwide on an $18 million budget. Yet Brüno’s box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film’s brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers — and that their tut-tutting got around fast. Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect.

The Twitter effect might be a tad overstated. To me it’s more the “Facebook status effect” than anything, but since tweets are public it’s easier to measure buzz this way. I already speculated in the earlier post that Hollywood is going to battle this “Twitter effect” by banking on more sure things, like sequels and (comic) book adaptations. But I’m sure there’s another way, one that’s more dynamic and not too much on the nose. Perhaps film studios will scale down on mid-level film budgets (especially advertising) a bit and look for the new “Juno” time and time again? Maybe this new age will bring a new polarity of 200 million dollar superfilms and a huge selection of indies, that some make it big and most don’t?

Thanks to Jani for the tip.

Hear hear:

Jaffe’s blog post here

My (similar) thoughts on Twitter.

Now, I’m not saying that I have never acted in this manner myself or that I’m some how above this kind of behavior (hey, I pasted a link to some photos from the fire to my Facebook status), nor am I really condemning it (though some comments were a bit on the tasteless side considering there was a real chance of lives being at danger in the incident), but I’m starting to believe more and more that this kind of hypernovelty is not exclusively a positive phenomenon of social media.

There’s a certain allure in being “in the know”. One of the most common stereotypes in cultural products is the brave journalist with the scoop story exposing the truth. Our culture reveres the pioneer and the trend setter: it’s a staple of our culture and it’s often seen as a trait of individuality. You can hear it in the way we talk about our holiday experiences, how we like “discovering” (though that’s rarely the case) new things and recommending them to friends, the we shop for clothes, and the way we value expertise, just to name a few. Having your finger on the pulse is also a sign of passion and a keenness for a given subject, which is hardly a bad thing.

However, having your ear constantly on the ground puts a certain strain on you, especially in this day and age of ubiquity of information. Whenever a new story or something interesting thing pops up, some people have an urge to “break” the story and sort of put up a flag on the story that says that “if this story becomes big, remember my name!”.

Being “first” (a rather relative term, to say the least) to blog/tweet about something has become more important than actually writing something meaningful about the subject. The urgency to act (because somebody might write about first!) does not really allow for deep thought or fact-checking. It also feeds a certain anti-intellectualism, making debate or analysis less and less of a merit of expertise.

For example, online newspapers have had to sacrifice (grudgingly, at times) some of their quality control in favor of promptness, because blogs and social networks were beating them to the story so often (as said, the hotel incident was “old news” within two hours of it happening). Smart newspapers have moved on to offer more in-depth or second opinion pieces, but that’s a whole other post.

Relating to my own field, I don’t like it how so many marketing blogs, for example, have become more or less obsessed about spreading viral videos or “cool campaigns” instead of actually discussing them. And if there is any type of analysis being done, the tone is hyped and one-sided. Ideas are reduced to bullet points or statements that look great in keynote presentations, but might not have any theoretical substance to them.

Services like Twitter have their merits – especially in acting as an information filter and connecting like-minded people – but people tend to overvalue it and forget what the trade offs of a constant information flow are. It takes deep thought, taking your time and actually detaching yourself from the information overload to create original thought.

Speed isn’t everything.