A Cocktail Party With Readers - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Is this a good thing, I wondered, or an epic waste of time?
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Twitter devotees at The Times tell me the benefits are real. Twitter enables them to be better reporters, for one thing. By selecting a universe of tweeters to follow, they can track news sources of all kinds, including rival journalists. They can create listening posts across every topic they need to monitor.
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I don’t read everything. I dip into Twitter when I have time. The analogy is a cocktail party. You can’t join every conversation, but you drift through the crowd and stop now and then.”
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he is planning a possible trip to Mauritania and has used Twitter to query his million-man follower group in search of expertise on the country — with good results.
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He has used it also for something that blogs and columns just aren’t appropriate for, he said: publishing a hunch.
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Twitter also enables writers to super-publish their work. A piece may be destined for NYTimes.com or the newspaper, but that doesn’t stand in the way of tweeting out a link to it.
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If the item is really popular, Twitter is effectively pushing a cloud of links far beyond the reach of The Times’s Web site and print edition.
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But there is more to it than gathering, understanding and publishing. Twitter, to hear Times staffers talk about it, is an environment. Inside, Mr. Carr said, “you can see what is getting heat and what is not.”
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I have made an effort to create a persona out of what I report,” he said. “I am always looking for articles, interesting quotes and things that center around my domain. I think people expect that of me, and that is why they follow me on Twitter.”
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Twitter, it seems apparent, enables journalists to report and publish actively in digital space. It allows them to create their own community. But this can become a self-limiting hive or, as Brian Stelter noted, “an echo chamber.”