Monday, March 01, 2010

Coverage Continued

Nothing new yet... but interesting comments in last night's thread.

I haven't gone through the whole thread here, but this comment struck me as being on the money. Though it's in reference to Twitter, I think it applies to all forms of coverage, in line with what I was hinting at yesterday:

I'm pretty sure this guy has a point. Twitter feeds are the journalistic equivalent to statstitical false precision. You're just gushing raw fatoids out to the public randomly rather than doing your job and condensing the facts into a narrative, providing some sort of context and frame, and informing the public as to the meaning behind a set of facts. Twitter may or may not have its uses - I'm skeptical personally, but such is my standard outlook on most things - but journalism is absolutely not one of those potential uses.

Off to mine the rest for more points to rattle around my peabrain.

5 Comments:

  • Twitter is to serious thoughtful discussion as Pop-Tarts are to a nutritous breakfast. Was that under 140 characters?

    By Anonymous Sunshine_Bobby_Carpenter_is_Too_Pessimistic_for_Me, at 3/02/2010 12:19 AM  

  • I was at a rain delayed game last spring (Jordan Z's first start, in fact). During the two-hour delay, the team was running twits on the big scoreboard and ecouraging fans to use their cell phones to add to the "discussion."

    Since there was only about 8,000 people in the stadium and I didn't see a single person around me reach for their phone, I knew most of the twits had to be being generated by team employees. Sure enough, lame stuff like "Go Nats" and "Let's Play Two" dominated the "conversation."

    It's only time in my life I've ever followed twitter stream (not have anything else to do), and it couldn't have been more inane.

    By Anonymous bdrube, at 3/02/2010 7:21 AM  

  • @bdrube: I was at that Jordan Zimmerman rain delayed game and saw those lame tweets/twits/twerts/whatever. But there was one that caught my eye, and also proved the Nats PR staff weren't filtering this stuff:
    "Best wishes from Mike Hunt."

    By Anonymous Sunshine_Bobby_Carpenter_is_Too_Pessimistic_for_Me, at 3/02/2010 8:34 PM  

  • I think I was at that game with some cranky sonofabitch.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 3/02/2010 9:54 PM  

  • screw you

    and for the record, those weren't tweets, luddites, but text messages. big difference.

    i was a twitter hater, but i've grown to really like it. once you figure it out, you can get a lot of actually useful information, a lot of good links/stories, and you can have actual conversations with people famous and not.

    By Blogger Chris Needham, at 3/02/2010 9:56 PM  

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