A minor flurry erupted on Twitter and in the blogosphere today, after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mused during a Reuters interview about creating a “Twitter News Service,” which he described as a kind of partnership with major news organizations to extract news from the micro-blogging network. A spokesman for Twitter later posted a message saying the company “no plans for a Twitter news network” and that Stone was simply thinking out loud.
Twitter staffer Matt Graves’ response was closer to the point, however: He said that the company was not thinking about creating a Twitter news service because “it already exists — it’s called Twitter.” In other words, Twitter is already functioning as a news network or distributed wire service, something we have pointed out a number of times in the past. When you can get live reports from victims and observers of earthquakes and other disasters within minutes of them happening, you have a news network.
That said, however, there is something interesting in what Stone seemed to be describing: using the massive stream of 100 million tweets a day that flows through Twitter as the basis of a kind of digital-age Associated Press or Reuters newswire, which news organizations could share and use as a tool for distributed eye-witness reporting from around the world. Reuters had the same thing in mind when it formed a partnership with NowPublic, the Vancouver “user-generated content” company that is now part of the Examiner group.
As Reuters chairman ** said at the time — not long after the tsunami in Indonesia — the newswire has thousands of reporters around the globe, but none of them happened to be anywhere close to Indonesia when the tsunami struck. Why not take advantage of the people who were there, and their ability to send reports and photos and video to the world? That’s exactly what Twitter allows, and we’ve seen it happen in dozens of cases already, from earthquakes in Haiti to bombings in London.
What news organizations really need is a way to filter through those millions of tweets and find the ones that really matter, and really add something verifiable to a breaking news story. The New York Times created its own verified lists of Twitter users during a shooting at Fort Hood and other news events, and there are tools like Storify and Curated.by that can make it easier to pull threads together during a live news story, but it is still not as easy as it could be.
What if Twitter had tools that could help them do that? That would really be interesting. Maybe the company isn’t thinking about it, but it should — there is a need, and someone is going to fill it.