On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 Wayne Hoff offered up:

>Here's a link to the Tunisia story that isn't chopped: http://bit.ly/ePiqJJ
>

And here was one of the earlier instances of this- Twitter use in the Iran
elections in 2009  http://wapo.st/fRh9sr  

In this case, there was an interesting twist, the Iranian Government had
intervened to shut down all forms of communication as a method of
controlling what was getting out, and although there was planned outages for
Twitter that week the US Government (supposedly) asked Twitter to "delay the
maintenance".

The users on the ground were referred to as 'citizen journalists' and they
were reporting what they saw... it was what is typically referred to as "raw
feed", and it has its place in news, but it's like the calls that come into
a police dispatcher- much of it is so emotionally charged that it may not be
entirely accurate, or it may be fueled in part by more visceral opinion than
fact.

This is really about the same as blogs.  They are almost always the voice of
one, an opinion of the individual that provides the information.  I know
this first hand, I have a few of them.  And in many cases, the writers DO
PROVIDE citations to support their opinions, but the citations may be to
OTHER blogs or sources that could be equally unsubstantiated.  

In hardcore journalism, you were always required to have multiple credible
sources before your editor would allow you to publish.  In college, we were
required to have three- they could remain unnamed or anonymous, but the
editor wanted you to demonstrate they existed before you went to press. 
There have been cases in the recent past where the NYTimes and others failed
to do this and got in hot water as I recall.   With blogs? One person is
typically the writer, the source, the editor AND the publisher.  At least
with two of the sites I publish on, there is peer review prior to posts
being put up.

This gives an overview of the differences that exist between the best known
varieties of publications  http://bit.ly/e7w7HI  ...pity it doesn't go a
couple of steps further and define blogs, Facebook statuses, Twitter posts =)

It's always a good idea to see things stated by multiple sources prior to
passing it along as something for others to consider as 'fact'... and if the
multiple sources are self-published or un-reviewed blogs, well... 

Larry
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