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Dear Any and All News Organizations...


Poe Dameron
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The following message applies to any form of news, including broadcasts, sports, TMZ, whatever:

 

Please do not ever, under any circumstances, publish a Twitter post as a news story, supporting a news story, or just giving flavor to a news story. Twitter is not news. I know you like Twitter because it gives you instant gratification while waiting on hold for the person you're covering can tell you no comment and to take a hike and it feels like it's the real world because you are super invested in it, however it is not.

 

If you would just follow this simple advise, you would immediately become a more credible source for news and would be doing your country and the world a service by not basing our media coverage on the reactions of collections of mobs and who has the hottest take.

 

Thank you, and good day.

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The only occasions I disagree about this are when the tweets in question are official communications that have either been declared to be official announcements from elected officials, such as the president, and/or the tweet is in regards to public safety and the general public that is the audience of the news medium in question has a need to know the information. Other than those specific times, though, I agree 100%.

 

I want to quickly clarify my caveats, though. For the first one, I ideally would not care what politicians/elected officials say on twitter (unless it helped demonstrate some pattern of unacceptable behavior), but when an administration has declared the tweets of a president/governor/etc. to be official communication from them, I believe that they are fair game for the media to cover and analyze, just as they would any other official communication.

 

For the second one, this mostly deals with emergency situations or times of hazardous environments, where an organization or local government may make announcements via twitter and various news organizations want to spread those claims to the broader general public who may not be on twitter. This would probably mostly relate to local news organizations, though.

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I think he's talking about the fact that almost half of Internet news stories are reactions to Twitter posts. No real story, just the original post, and then however many reactions to it. It is annoying.

 

I almost forgot "news" stories that are Twitter reactions to what happened in whatever news story that day.

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