Junk Food For The Soul

Adam Videos facebook, the onion, twitter

I’m growing a little tired of the “Twitter is going to replace news outlets” whining. We keep hearing this because the news sources themselves are the ones who are terrified of this … and never shut up about it. But like most other cases, progress doesn’t necessarily have to do away with one piece of the puzzle when another comes along. However, the picture does change.

Twitter isn’t going to replace mainstream media. It just becomes part of the investigative cycle. Gone are the days when to get a story out you had to make contact with a reporter and convince him to write something. You would give him bits and pieces of the story until the reporter could persuade his editor to run with it.

Now everyone can talk to everyone. The holy veil has been torn down. No longer do we have to wait for one high priest to enter the “Holy of Holies” once a year and then pass on the word.

Yet, people still go to churches.

Society still wants to hear what pastors, priests, and the like have to say. Yes there are more of them, but people still trust that these men and women of the cloth have devoted their lives to knowing and understanding religion and therefore are more informed than the average man.

They are, in effect, religious editors.

Reporters aren’t going anywhere, but they are changing their routines. The few who aren’t already will simply have to spend more time actually listening to people … and doing so online. They will have to monitor blogs, the phones, other news outlets … and, yes, Twitter.

But it’s the role of the editor that I believe has become more important. John Q. Public still depends on journalists to sift through the news and make sense of it. To bring in the experts to shed light on the parts of the story that might be the most important and to make sure that both sides of the story is being told. You know, good old-fashioned journalism.

A news source doesn’t have to always break the news to be an important part of the story. Bloggers and Twitter users might be able to break a story quicker, but they normally don’t have the resources to really tell the full story.

So don’t worry mainstream media guys, people still trust news outlets like CNN and the New York Times … they just may not always turn to them first.

Adam Journalism, Technology mainstream media, twitter