USA Today Copies BusinessWeek, Tweets a Story about Twitter

By Kyle Austin

Del Jones, who makes a living interviewing CEO’s for USA Today’s Money Section, became the latest reporter to promote their Twitter aptitude with a Money Section cover story today on CEO’s tweeting (Well, it was supposed to be about the USA drifting away from capitalism toward a European-style hybrid of capitalism and socialism).

However,  it seems Jones may have learned a lesson that Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek learned last May when trying to piece together a story purely through Twitter.

Twitter’s 140 character limit doesn’t cater to a colorful story. As Baker noted in November of this year in an interview with RaceTalk:

Stephen Baker: The story “Why Twitter Matters,” came out in May, a week after I opened up the live thread with the Twitter community, which allowed them to contribute to the story (May 8-9). Anyway, I got a lot of input, but the trouble with it was people didn’t want to write paragraphs. I was hoping they would craft the story with me. They just wanted to give me ideas and leave the story writing to me.

RT: I imagine it was tough for them to contribute 140 characters at a time?

SB: Yes. I thought they may try to write paragraphs together (140 characters at a time). When I set it up I thought it was going to be so easy. I would write the topic sentence for the paragraph and while the responses come in, I can go off to the Modern Museum of Arts and enjoy myself for half an hour – and then come back to see the paragraph constructed. It ended up being pretty chaotic and took a lot more work than a regular story.

The one difference between the two examples being: Baker set out to write a story about Twitter using Twitter, Jones simply set out to write a story using Twitter that ended up having more to do with Twitter than his intended subject matter (Guessing the editors played a role in that as well.)

As Dan Gilmor notes in his own post about the USA Today Twitter-piece today, the end result of a reported story centered around 140-character blurbs is, not surprisingly, a disjointed one.

In fact,  Jones story reminds me of a former USA Today column – Larry King’s discontinued one, which included Mr. King’s disjointed conscious stream in no particular order (I’m guessing that is why Larry has taken to liking Twitter so much). Only this piece isn’t as fun, given it’s the disjointed thoughts of many people and it comes on the back-end of the huge WE GET TWITTER plug from USA Today (pictured above).

Yes, Twitter (as a part of social media) may be a huge piece of the future of journalism. The New York Times apparently gets it and it is likely that the USA Today understands it as well.  But the future of journalism isn’t pieces like this…. At least I hope it isn’t.

4 comments May 28th, 2009

GigaOM Launches New Revenue Model with GigaOM Pro

By Ben Haber

Om Malik and the GigaOM Network have launched a new revenue model today, taking the form of a subscription-only service called GigaOM Pro. The site, which will cover infrastructure, mobile green IT and consumer, has already launched and subscriptions to the service are currently available for $79 per year.

GigaOM Pro was introduced by Malik this morning and he outlined the thinking that went into the service:

We have created a research-driven platform that allows informed insiders, our community of readers and our network of analysts, editors and reporters to engage on an ongoing basis. We want this to be your one-stop shop for getting a grip on some of the newer technology trends. We are kicking it off by following some of the most rapidly changing sectors of the technology industry…and will add more in the coming weeks.

Malik also notes that it was obvious he would not be able to build a next-generation media entity on advertising revenue alone – a notion that some newspapers may want to think about more closely.

At first look (and without a subscription) GigaOM Pro looks like a great site. Each section is set up similar, and features a weekly update, “long” view, research update and a quarterly wrap-up. There are also data highlights and research, and much of the content is written by GigaOM’s regular contributors.

2 comments May 28th, 2009