HometownSource Blogs

It’s ability to inform is, in my opinion, diminished by its ability to overwhelm, intrude and waste time. But let’s face it, Twitter is all the rage.

I don’t care that you’re “making a spaghetti dinner for (you) and (your) boyfriend while wearing (your) favorite green T-shirt” and I REALLY don’t care that you’re “trying to pull (yourself) out of bed.”

If people truly cared about those things they’d call you, go out to dinner with you or meet up with you for a cup of coffee, not “follow” your “140 characters or less” when they should probably be working or paying attention in class.

But these days, that’s probably less true.

While I’m often the first to cite generational gaps as evidence that “our parents just don’t get it” or “you have to change with the times,” I just haven’t been able to buy into the latest products which harvest invasive qualities that grow exponentially with their respective popularity.

First, it was MySpace, which began as “A Place for Friends” and a way for people to create an autobiography or post journal entries for the world (or your 934 so-called “friends”) to read daily. Now, MySpace has evolved into being a great marketing tool for garage bands to build a fan base, but has lost its social networking appeal.

The social web God then became Facebook, which began as a way for college students to stay connected with high school and college friends upon graduation. In the beginning, when I embraced the medium with open arms, it required a valid e-mail address from recognizable institution like a college or university. But with the expansion of the Facebook market came high school aged students and obscene language and lewd pictures (this was a problem since the social network’s inception, but became more widespread with the more young people who were allowed to join). From there, you could easily have predicted that  the addition of susceptible youths would invite manipulative advertisements and mindless facestalking.

Well, now, like it or not, we have Twitter.

If you had 140 characters, a lot of time to waste and an ego so big that you believe people actually care that you’re “going to brush (your) teeth before bed, have to wake up at 7 for school tomorrow,” you would have Twitter.

For that reason, I don’t.

But, if you had 140 characters, a breaking news story and a general public interested in getting up-to-the-minute news from an otherwise weekly newspaper, you could have the Record’s version of Twitter.

At the Record, we have decided to Tweet about breaking news and breaking news only.  We won’t be sending you messages that we are currently posting an article about the School Board voting to take meatloaf off the lunch menu, because that isn’t breaking news.  We are going to adhere to strict guidelines that will make this new technology relevant for years (or months the way things develop these days) to come.  If a story is developing, we will Tweet to notify you that we are on it.

For example, when the Flensburg bar burned down recently, I responded to the scene when a reader called in the news tip just minutes after the fire allegedly started.  It took me 15 minutes to drive out to the scene, 30 minutes to take pictures, and 15 minutes to return back to the office.  It took another 15 minutes or so to post the photos and a brief story on when it was thought to have begun, the unknown cause and the authorities that responded.  In all, it took a little over an hour from when the fire started to get the word out to readers.
In the Twitter world, I would Tweet readers that a news tip came in about the Flenbsurg bar being on fire. I would then drive out there, and Tweet that we verified it as fact and were currently taking photos of the firefighters doing their job.  I would then notify readers with a Tweet that the photos had been posted on the Record’s website. Theoretically, this would allow readers to follow the news as it breaks and not after.  We would also include a link to our website to give readers one-click access to the full story.
There will be adjustments as we go along and quite frankly, there might not be a lot of reader interest in Twitter updates.  But we will utilize this tool as a public service to keep our readers even more informed.

We will never develop a TwitterEgo.
If you have thoughts or concerns about this move, feel free to contact us by emailing mcr@mcrecord.com or calling (320) 632-2345.