Aren’t a lot of the reasons why Twitter is better than journalism actually reasons why it’s not?

I like Twitter as much as the next guy, but I’ve never thought of the notion that it could somehow replace journalism as anything more than hyperbole. It’s a great way to communicate with people, and there’s certainly a lot of potential value to tweeting on the ground and providing an alternative to official press coverage. At best, that makes it a supplement to journalism, and a great one at that – but not its successor.

Indeed, a lot of the supposed evidence people point to when they argue that Twitter could somehow replace journalism doesn’t really prove the point at all. Hell, some of it practically contradicts it.

“Alternative,” for example, as used above, should never be confused with “better,” “less biased,” or “more accurate.” That’s an obvious point when you spell it out, but it bears repeating, because it’s easy to forget from time to time. A lot of the excitement around Twitter stems from the fact that it’s something new and different, and although that’s a lot of fun, it’s also not enough.

I’m sure that trained professional journalists aren’t the only ones who bristle at the notion that some kid with an iPhone can do their job better than they can. I’m not saying it never happens, because it does every now and then. At the very least, there are plenty of examples of social media contributing to a story and broadening the reporting.

But it’s not like the citizen journalist is somehow inherently superior because of the medium he or she is using. We certainly haven’t reached a point at which we should all take the word of some guy on Twitter over a contradictory report in a major newspaper, just because that guy is saying something different.

Too many people are willing to do so on principle – and to be fair, that mentality didn’t originate with Twitter. You shouldn’t believe everything you read at the best of times, of course, and I think we can all agree that 2010 gave us plenty of reasons to lose faith in our news media.

But critical engagement with the media doesn’t end with the major players. The people who provide alternative viewpoints – the weeklies, the blogs, and all the folks on Twitter who were “there” – ought to be taken with just as much of a grain of salt.

Again, I’m sure that sounds obvious, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of the more vocal critics of the mainstream media from taking whatever opposing claims or opinions they get from the alternative press or social media sites at face value, without a trace of irony. And Twitter gets the benefit of the doubt a little too often, I think, just because it’s a forum in which something different – and not necessarily something more accurate or well-informed – is often being said.

That’s not to say that Twitter isn’t invaluable. I turn to Twitter for a broader perspective on certain stories and events, because I’m following a lot of people who’ve got a lot of engaging, well-informed things to say. But at the end of the day, most of the time, the conversations start with something we read in the paper or saw on television. At best, Twitter and its users are still piggybacking on the established news media.

Worse yet, perhaps worst of all, is the notion that Twitter is somehow better just because it’s faster. Sure, I guess it’s neat when a story breaks on Twitter, but how many of those stories are later heavily qualified, if not shown to be nothing but rumour? And to what extent is that a product of the fact that people on Twitter don’t have the same standards and obligation to report the facts as journalists? And isn’t the whole “faster is better” mentality one of the worst aspects of mainstream journalism in the first place?

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