The social upheaval of the 1960s and 70s may have been the open door to a reporting and writing style unlike that previously seen by the mainstream media and publishing houses of the day. Could the next generation of the New Journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and others, already be underway? We’ve been hearing rumblings from the contemporary MSM for some time on the blogger/journalist issue and seen firewalls erected on previously free websites. Now, apparently feeling threatened, the Associated Press is whining at staff to stay off Twitter, even though they may be in the middle of, or even swept up into the midst of a developing event.
Associated Press Staff Scolded for Tweeting Too Quickly About OWS Arrests
“In relation to AP staff being taken into custody at the Occupy Wall Street story, we’ve had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off,”
So will Twitter be the vehicle for an abbreviated style of New Journalism? Mathew Ingram has a few thoughts.
Memo to AP: Twitter is the newswire now
Updated: It’s a distributed digital-information network that gives subscribers short news updates in something approaching real time, whether on the web or a mobile device. If you said Twitter, you would be right. But that same description also fits traditional newswires like Associated Press and Reuters. So how are they trying to evolve and compete with this new social news service? According to an internal memo obtained by New York magazine, AP’s response is to admonish its reporters for posting news to Twitter instead of saving it for the company’s traditional wire-service subscribers — even though the news in question was about their own arrest in a crackdown on an Occupy Wall Street demonstration.
OTOH, Reuters is sounding a bit more pragmatic.
Reuters reporter Robert MacMillan made effectively the same point on Twitter, saying a news service that waits and tries to “save” the news for later is really just asking to be beaten by another service that decides not to wait. And Anthony De Rosa, the social-media editor for Reuters (the AP’s major competitor) wrote in a blog post that the wire service sees posting news to Twitter and other social networks as a key part of its business, not competition for the traditional wire
Save the news for later and be beaten by another service or <gasp> a DFH protester. Oh the shame!
