While I remain optimistic, lots of people are telling Twitter off for its role in Iran. There’s definitely a few points to be made in this post (and those she links too). However, while there is much room for exaggeration in Twitter, I think it is possible to accurately deduce the atmosphere in Iran through the constant stream of updates. Most importantly, it means that this general atmosphere is converted into a forefront ‘global event’ which survives the media’s ADD.
Without this, the movement in Iran would be bogged down by reports about puppies being flushed down toilets or CNN’s write off of the whole thing. While journalists are trained professionals, they have a whole host of problems that many believe social media can fill quite nicely. Journalists are generally distanced from the events themselves, parachuted in, unable to access what’s really happening on the ground, equally prone to exaggeration (but without context), and the list goes on. I don’t think anyone is trying to discount the role of journalists in Iran, but I do think that most of us see a new avenue here which journalism can’t fill.
And, I say this as someone who freelances in the industry and who one day wouldn’t mind joining a newsroom.
Plenty of people have been discounting the role of journalists in Iran, but you make a bigger point that I think is important: the parachuting in and out of journalists. That’s a difficult and terrible model, and there are some journalism orgs adopting a new strategy–like GlobalPost. It’s traditional journalism, but online, so one could argue that it’s “social media”–but the decision not to fly journos in but base them in the places they cover has nothing to do with whether they run audio-slideshows. It’s an editorial philosophy, and that’s a professional ethics and perspective question, not a question of what tool you’re using.
And that’s my other point: Twitter, Facebook, even blogs–these things are just tools. Journalists can wield them as well as anyone else; I’m not sure how journalism and “social media” somehow got put into mutually exclusive, antagonistic camps. But it’s a mistake to treat social media like some magical panacea. It’s still media. And without proper use, it’s going to fail as easily as–gasp–a newspaper.