Cover it on Twitter, says newspaper editor’s daughter

via lostremote

You know, I love Twitter as much as the next guy who found a beautiful woman and a whole heap of amazing friends there (hi, guys!!), but I’m more than a little surprised by the sudden willingness to outsource publishing to what is at best a quasi-reliable, third party platform. Yes, Twitter’s API is great (when it works and when I’m not being woken up at 8am on a Sunday morning when Tweets are being delayed by 15 minutes because of API caching issues. (Seriously.)) and yes they clearly “get it” and are being very smart about being open and all of that. But at the end of the day news operations are being rebuilt around a company or two that seem largely disinterested in those very operations. To put it another way, imagine if there were only one network for email and one, albeit pretty cool, company controlled that 1. Would we be so excited about newspapers jumping on that trend?

I’d love to believe that this is a shining example of news orgs finally abandoning the very annoying “not invented here” habits that have hampered them for so long but they seem to be doing it by chasing a trend without much thought. Is real time communication important? Of course. Is Twitter a critical part of that still burgeoning ecosystem? Naturally. Instead of just relying on the chatter tools of “the younger generation”, though, it’d be nice to see a more vested interest in creating and using open, sustainable publishing platforms.

1 The “one network to rule them all” thing almost happened, remember. Before the web took off, AOL, Prodigy, the MSN network, eWorld, etc. were all trying to be the way we connected.