Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s more a smoky bar, shadowy garage, corporate breakroom, and boisterous mob gathering — places reporters traditionally went to tease out news leads — all rolled into one. Twitter is a place where people talk, often while inebriated or delusional (believing a public forum is somehow private). It’s a gathering of intelligent and average people with smart thoughts and dumb thoughts. It’s peppered with marketing people with PR ploys and social media pros with marketing plays. It’s a collection of friends and enemies, strangers and acquaintances, rebels and tea partiers and traditionally scandalous politicians. In other words, it’s a reflection of the real world with a bounty of tidbit pickin’s and tantalizing leads, but it isn’t a newsroom.
Twitter is just one of many places journalists go to meet sources and troll for news.
— http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/06/twitter-for-newsrooms-a-master.php
