#oldmediajustgotserved

Today, at The Future of Journalism blog over at Salon.com, King Kaufman has an excellent takedown of twitter abstainers.

Here's Kaufman's brutally efficient dissection of the Washington media's collective yawn over Twitter:

"Because it's all about you. These people look at every communication medium as a place for them to express themselves, not as a place for people to communicate with each other. They'd be amazed to find out how much a person can learn from Twitter if they only had the slightest interest in learning about new things. They'd be shocked to find out that there are people who do more listening than talking, who use Twitter as their main news feed, who can't possibly get to all the great stuff linked to in that feed."

Comments

[Dennis Cook]

Kaufman's "brutally efficient dissection" falls a bit short as far as I can tell.

Of the old-guard, beltway insiders he says, "They'd be amazed to find out how much a person can learn from Twitter if they only had the slightest interest in learning about new things. They'd be shocked to find out that there are people who do more listening than talking, who use Twitter as their main news feed, who can't possibly get to all the great stuff linked to in that feed." If that's true, why doesn't Kaufman offer any examples of useful, informative, or insightful tweets? I'm sure there are some, but there sure is a lot of drivel there too.

And what would Kaufman make of the recent random sample survey reported in the Business Times which claims that "...40.5 percent of the updates fell into the 'pointless babble' category"? The author of the study also commented that he was “...most surprised that the news factor was so low.”

Find the BT story at: http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2009/08/10/daily76.html?surround=etf&ana=e_article

[Jeff Gire]

Excellent points. I'll have to check out the BT story. I think King's main argument is that Twitter shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as completely frivolous... maybe just 40.5 percent frivolous.

In King's post, he mentions a pretty good point from James Wolcott at Vanity Fair, who says "I keep thinking that the moment I get into it, it'll be over ... I keep thinking there's going to be something after Twitter."

Twitter could very well turn out to be a flash in the pan. Or a link in the evolution of new media. Or it could turn out to be a pillar of this new media.

Remember how quickly MySpace faded when a smarter social networking service surfaced? Maybe a smarter Twitter is around the corner...

I imagine that, just as engaging, well designed, smart print publications will thrive in this new landscape, it's going to be the useful Twitter feeds that have staying power.