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 The ongoing protests in Iran over the recent presidential election have given new fuel to the fiery debate between the world of social media reportage and the mainstream media – a phrase we detest, by the way.
Regionally, two happily outspoken bloggers have taken up the causes of both sides of this debate: in the YouTwitFace corner we have Alexander McNabb, of the Fake Plastic Souks blog, and in the MSM (urgh) corner we have Jen Gerson of The National, and her own eponymous web log.
In recent blog posts (FPS here, JG here) both make some interesting points and counter-points about the supposed failure of the, let's call it traditional, media to cover the Iranian election comprehensively, and the apparent victory of Twitter users in the same battle.
There's no doubt that people on Twitter got there first with some stories – or rather, information and specific events – and that traditional media sources lagged behind.
McNabb, and many, many others, is taking this as a qualified victory for social media, specifically Twitter. To be fair, he does also note a number of problems with using Twitter as a credible source of information, such as the unverifiable nature of data disseminated on the service.
But we're going to side with Gerson on this one in suggesting it WASN'T a failure for the traditional media. She points out that while Twitter can cater to a very specialised audience, the “mainstream media” must be just that – mainstream.
Gerson also notes that much of the information on Twitter regarding the Iranian election protests came from traditional media sources such as wire services or the BBC's Persian news feed.
More fundamentally, she makes the point that, if it's doing its job right, the traditional media should be going out and checking its sources and facts, not just firing off 140-character bursts of unreferenced information – or necessarily relying on the self-same bursts as primary sources.
To this we would add the observation that journalists working in traditional media are paid to care about getting the story right, whereas Twitter users are beholden to no one but themselves – and are most often motivated to tweet by a strong personal belief in their subject matter, rather than a passion for accuracy.
This means that while Twitter is more and more likely to have a user posting about some event ahead of the traditional media, this will be buried among a larger volume of dross, disinformation, and outright stupidity. And as Twitter's popularity grows, this signal-to-noise ratio will only get less favourable.
Sure, as Gerson points out, you can spend all day glued to Twitter, following the hundreds, thousands of posts on a popular subject, checking up on each one to see how credible its information may be. If you have a job that permits that level of commitment to breaking news, we salute you.
For the rest of us, Twitter is a great tool, and great fun – but it is not, and almost certainly never will be, a replacement for traditional media.
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