Muck Rack, home of 140-character dispatches from the field, gets useful
Muck Rack, which aggregates tweets by professional journalists, instantly became my least favorite web startup when it launched in April with an endless stream of chatter from the Fourth Estate.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after ReadWriteWeb catalogued how reporters were already using Twitter for journalism, Muck Rack tried to productize that habit: launched in April 2009, it aggregates the tweets of professional journalists into a single stream. Nieman Lab's reviewer dismissed it at launch as his least favorite web startup — an unfiltered firehose of Fourth Estate chatter — and this piece marks his reversal now that the site has added enough structure to be genuinely useful.
First-order effects
- Journalists whose accounts Muck Rack aggregates get a public, browsable record of their 140-character dispatches, visible to editors and readers who would never follow each of them individually.
Second-order effects
- The site competes with Twitter's own following model: its value rests entirely on being a better filter of journalist activity than users' hand-built lists, so any improvement Twitter makes to search or grouping squeezes the aggregator's reason to exist.
Third-order effects
- If curation layers keep proving more useful than raw streams, journalists' real-time posting shifts from an experimental habit — the stage the 2008 coverage captured — toward tracked, comparable professional output that outlets and sources monitor systematically.
The trend: Real-time social posting by journalists is being wrapped in aggregation and curation layers that convert individual tweets into a trackable professional beat.