Tweets are the new quotes
Have you ever been quoted in a news article or blog post? If so, you know it can be a strange experience: you recognize your words, but they never sound quite right. It's the peril of transcription. — That's just one of a couple reasons we like ReadWriteWeb's approach …
Context & Ripple Effects
ReadWriteWeb had already framed Twitter as a reporting tool, including a 2009 examination of how media can take cues from Twitter and its writers' use of short posts to source larger stories. Its April 2010 look at what a tweet looks like set up the practical question of how those posts should appear in published coverage.
Twitter's proposed embedding approach gives publishers a way to present a post as the original object rather than a transcription, addressing the attribution and wording problem identified in the article.
First-order effects
- ReadWriteWeb and other publishers can quote Twitter users through an embedded post, preserving the original wording and platform context rather than retyping it.
- Twitter gains a more direct role in the presentation layer of online journalism, while quoted users' posts become visible inside third-party articles.
Second-order effects
- Newsrooms that already use Twitter for sourcing can incorporate posts into stories with less transcription and clearer attribution, tightening the link between reporting workflow and publication format.
Third-order effects
- If publishers adopt embedded posts broadly, social updates become reusable primary-source objects in web publishing, shifting quotation from editorial reproduction toward platform-mediated display.
The trend: Twitter is moving from a tool journalists use to find information toward infrastructure through which journalism displays and attributes it.