At the time of the sale, Newsvine was promising to integrate some of those web 2.0 features into the main MSNBC properties. CEO Mike Davidson told ReadWriteWeb in 2007 that "over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense." Has that actually occured? Let's check in with Newsvine to find out.

Newsvine is a "Citizen Journalism" site; a news publication built using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens. It also syndicates content from its parent company MSNBC, Associated Press and others. Newsvine has a lot in common with social news sites like Digg and Slashdot - only it has more mainstream topics.

Slow Development, But Keeping Abreast of Trends

What's new at Newsvine circa 2009? There is nothing overly different from what we saw in 2007, but the site continues to look elegant and is still packed with social features.

Newsvine appears to have kept up with current trends - we noted today a Real-Time Web feature, called Newsvine LIVE. This is a rapidly scrolling view of emerging stories, displayed as a pane on the right-hand side of the homepage.

However as with many startups that get acquired by big companies, the pace of development at Newsvine slowed considerably after being bought. A scan of the Newsvine blog this year doesn't show much development. There was some administrative work done on groups and a hook-up with Facebook. Not much else is noted in the blog, although Newsvine has been active in developing widgets for sites like Netvibes and Yahoo.

Mike Davidson blogged in August that "things, for the most part, are going swimmingly [at Newsvine]." He admitted though that "building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being."

Traffic: Steady

When we last spoke to Newsvine, in July 2007 just prior to its acquisition, Newsvine was getting about 1.2 million unique visitors per month. It was said to be growing at an average rate of 46% per quarter. The top topics in Newsvine in mid-07 were Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere of that time.

Traffic over the past year at Newsvine has been fairly flat, at least according to Compete - which puts the US unique visitors at around 1.2 million and shows little growth.

However in an August 2009 post, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson claimed that Newsvine now gets "over 4 million uniques a month." So perhaps Compete's statistics are too low (which wouldn't be the first time).

Conclusion

All seems fine and dandy at Newsvine, despite slow development of new features on the site.

However, as yet there is little evidence of Newsvine functionality on MSNBC sites - certainly the readers don't contribute much content to them. Hopefully we see more of that over the coming year, as Mike Davidson did say integration would occur "over the next few years" back in 2007.

Overall, it's good to see that Newsvine's community is still relatively vibrant. As of time of writing, a story entitled 'Dick Cheney was a Lying, Treasonous Coward' has 239 comments. Evidence that it is an MSNBC site after all!

Jeff Jarvis does a great job of defining a different way to do investigative journalism, which he calls process journalism. I prefer to call it iterative journalism. Everyone follows a "process," so that word doesn't really define it. Traditional journalists follow a process, and so do blogger journalists. Theirs are just different processes.

"Iterative" is the way of the Web. Create something, put it out there, get reactions, improve. That has to be the future.

But apart from the name, I take big issue with the way some bloggers seize on this as a way to put a respectable spin on what has always been called "yellow journalism" or "gossip rag" material. You can make a ton of money doing that. No, I won't name names here, but the best practitioners of this game have no illusions.

I recall an interview with the editor of one of the most notorious gossip rags, one of whose headlines trumpeted: "Hitler found alive in Afghanistan." I just had to pick it up and scan it while waiting in line at the supermarket. The publication's evidence went as follows:

• Here is a picture of a German Shepherd dog outside a cave in the mountains,
• The cave is in Afghanistan (which looked plausible, if not for Photoshop),
• Hitler liked German Shepherd dogs,
• Ergo, Hitler was in that cave.

The editor had just retired, and the interviewer asked him, "Okay, now that you have retired, you can admit it. You made up some of those stories, right?"

The editor laughed and said, "No, I can tell you with 100% honesty that we never made up a single story. Really. We were simply not that rigorous in checking the stories that people sent to us."

He had outsourced creativity to his readers! Crowdsourcing is not new.

I didn't buy that paper. I just scanned it in the check-out line. But online, I might have clicked. I would have snorted with derision and left the website quickly, but I still would have clicked. Just as I might click on the headline "Google said to be in talks to buy Apple."

That click is money. And yellow journalism exists online.

We can do better than that.

We have to do better. No matter what bloggers believe, the "man on the street" view is that they cannot be trusted. Well, maybe some can be trusted, but that trust is earned every day, the hard way.

The Fourth Estate's Claim to Public Good

In an earlier post on Journalism 2.0, I posited the question, "Would citizen journalists have exposed Watergate?"

The debate was clearly between traditional journalists ("No way. That required serious investigative skills, time, and money.") and bloggers ("With millions of eyes, the truth will always come out.").

In this debate, I am 100% in the blogger/citizen journalist's camp. My opinion has been forged by seeing what happens in countries where government pressure shuts down a story. The Watergate story was not just about tenacious journalists. It was just as much about the bravery of Katherine Graham, the publisher who agreed to take on the wrath of the government by going with the story. Imagine a different publisher, who gets a call from the White House...

In Asia, I have personally seen tenacious journalists stopped dead in their tracks by government pressure and seen their financial backers ruined and exiled. It's ugly stuff and happens all the time. But now there are far too many ways for a story to get out. That kind of government control is no more, and that is great.

The news from Iran shows that pretty clearly.

But Twitter is unreliable drivel that can be gamed, you say? This is not about Twitter. Twitter is just one piece in a layer in the emerging news/journalism stack.

The Emerging Journalism Stack

The old model was vertical integration. The publisher owned the printing press, bought the ink, hired the reporters, delivered the paper, and sold the ads. As in many technology industries, change begets a layered stack. And like it or not, news is now just another digital artifact.

So, here is the emerging stack:

• Bottom: millions of eyes, with camera phones, SMS, Twitter, whatever works at the time. No media firm can replicate this. When people talk about funding journalism through non-profit foundations, it should be along the lines of: make sure everybody in the Peace Corps knows how to do this, or give Amnesty International money to report on prisoner abuse, or give Greenpeace money to report on environmental issues. In fact, not much else is needed beyond what is already happening; the crashing prices of cell phones is making this available to billions of people.
• Middle: the spotters and amplifiers, people who see the potential importance of a story and do a bit more research online and use their network to push the story out. Many of these people have an axe to grind, which makes them motivated, but one has to take what they say with a grain of salt.
• Top: the final mile of media, the trusted brands. Each has to earn the public's trust every day. When you see a news item coming from multiple sources, which do you click on? Different clicks for different folks; this is no winner-take-all market. Can be MSM, can be niche. But that trust is earned every day. Facts have to be checked, and that takes time, money, and training.

The truly amazing thing today is our ability to cruise up and down this stack at will: to see the raw reports from the million eyes, to hear the impassioned voice of the amplifier, and to see how the story emerges down the final mile of media.

Finding Common Ground

The future will play out as it will no matter what either party says. The only question for individuals involved in the journalism/news business is, how do you position yourself in that stack.

It is time for both parties to accept some truths.

Traditional media journalists have to accept that the economic model of their industry is fundamentally and irrevocably broken. It will not return. Ever. Get used to it. Adapt. Many people have to adapt to change, and journalists are no different.

Bloggers have to accept that readers are looking for the rigor of traditional journalists. We have to figure out how to get enough money to do that properly or else do it much more efficiently.

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

Another good example for an organization that was awarded a grant by the the Knight Foundation is the Coral Gables Community Foundation in Coral Gables, Florida. This group, together with the University of Miami, will use its grant to train seniors to report, write, and blog about local affairs.

A complete list of sponsored projects can be found here. A second round of grants will be awarded later this year.

These appear to be buttons you can click on, but they are only there for displaying the information. In order to access the commenting and feedback features, you have to actually click the headline to read the article. That's a very minor complaint, though, as it's the commenting feature that really makes the News Mixer site shine.

Facebook Connect Makes the News Personal

Because of the site's integration with Facebook Connect, News Mixer is able to highlight the comments left by your Facebook friends. This brings their thoughts to your attention which in turn delivers a more personalized news experience. (Unfortunately, I couldn't test that aspect of the commenting feature since I don't know anyone in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)

If you choose to participate, you can select from a drop-down box of responses which will preface your comment. By default, the site suggested "Sarah Thinks." (Obviously, your name would display in place of "Sarah.") Other options include "feels," "wonders," "agrees," "disagrees," "hates," and "loves." These choices are very similar to the options presented to you at the microblogging site Plurk, a Twitter-like site for sharing status updates with friends. On Plurk, you are also given various color-coded prompts to choose from when posting a note, the same as News Mixer.

Another plus to News Mixer's commenting feature is its transparent nature. Instead of allowing for the creation of fake names or internet handles for use on the site, Facebook authentication means that people's real identities are being displayed. No more comments left by internet trolls hiding behind their mask of anonymity!

Today's commenting systems are largely broken, as social media pundit Robert Scoble noted today on his blog. The main reason for his post was to share ideas about the state of commenting and interaction systems on the web. He wanted there to be a way that he, as the writer, could call attention to some comments as being more important than others. He had also said that he wished there was a way to see the social networks of the people commenting. As it turns out, News Mixer has introduced a great example of how that second request of his could work.

Newspapers: Steal These Ideas!

Although at the moment the News Mixer site appears somewhat plain and clunky, you can see the potential is in its framework, if not its design. In fact, the press release even notes that the New York Times interactive news technologies editor Aron Pilhofer encouraged media industry members to look at News Mixer, adding that there were "bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now."

We would encourage others in the industry to borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because...well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former.

According to citizen reporter, Johntw: "Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack." Apple quickly squashed the story, claiming it to be untrue. Did citizen journalism just fail us? You bet it did.

The report about Steve Jobs appeared on CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport this morning. It read as follows:

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven't seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

Silicon Alley Insider then proceeded to follow up, making phone calls to Apple. They were able to reach Katie Cotton, Vice President of Worldwide Communications, who replied saying "It is not true."

This Is Trouble

The question was then raised: do false reports like this damage CNN's credibility? The answer is yes, absolutely. This particular report may even lead to an SEC investigation where CNN will be asked to provide an IP address for the user who posted the story.

The problem here stems from the fact that because CNN has obviously decided not to police or edit the iReport section of their web site, the section is left wide open to "reporters" who want to wreak a little havoc.

But who are these citizen journalists? And how easy is it to become one?

Apparently, it's as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There's a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.

Above: The Registration Form - Congratulations, You're A Journalist!

While most citizen journalists take their responsibility seriously as reporters of actual news, it's apparent that with iReport, just as with any web site on the internet today, there is going to be someone who decides to have a little sick "fun" with it. Who is the reporter by the name of Johntw anyway? As far as we could tell, the only way to get in touch with the reporter is through iReport's built-in messaging system. We sent him an email asking him why he reported this story, but it remains unanswered. In our minds, we're already imagining an adolescent kid who's having a good laugh with their friends this morning over how they just "punked" CNN.

We're interested in seeing how will CNN respond to this muddying of their good name. Will they disassociate themselves a bit from iReport? Or will they just be happy for the pageviews it brought? And will this give pause to other news outlets thinking of launching citizen journalism sites of their own? It's very possible. In these tough economic times, news reports that affect how the markets move are taken very seriously. Had the timing of this report been different, Apple stock could have really suffered. Fortunately, the rebuttal today came out fast enough that it shouldn't have any long-term effects. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

Rumors Gone Wild

Specifically, Noughton cites a rumor that Michelle Obama, wife of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, was caught on video tape hurling a racial epithet about white people. The rumor started on Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog. His source? "Someone in touch with a senior Republican" who knows that a "major McCain backer has a copy of the tape." Later, Johnson says he's learned more about the tape via "five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

Despite the clear lack of a credible source, the rumor had serious legs. From friend of a friend of a friend hearsay, to a mention on Fox News as "credible buzz," to Obama being asked about it by a reporter from the well-respectd McClatchy News Service. "So the story whirls around the echo-chamber of the paranoid, right-wing blogosphere, with the odd whisk from Fox News reporters, until it reaches hysteria," says Noughton. And though no tape has surfaced, damage has potentially been done.

Therein, perhaps, lies a danger in putting too much credence in the blogosphere and citizen journalism. At times having untrained eyes on the ground can be invaluable at getting the story reported, and sometimes citizen journos can beat the mainstream press to a breaking story. But when your sources are relying on rumors heard from friends, lending credence to those rumors by mentioning them in the mainstream press is toxic.

We've seen rumors run wild on the tech end have real-world consequences as well. Last May when Engadget erroneously reported that Apple was planning to delay Leopard and the iPhone, the company lost $4 billion in market cap in an afternoon. Even though Engadget quickly updated its headline and story when Apple denied the rumors and said their source (a memo) was a fake, the story was frozen in time on Techmeme and in people's RSS readers with the wrong information.

The Solution

With the rise of Twitter, mobile video blogging, and other tools of citizen journalism, the news cycle is now seconds. With news rolling in non-stop 24 hours per day, the continuous, Twitterized cycle doesn't leave much time for fact checking -- speed matters. But that's not the future that Noughton hopes for.

When rumors published and repeated without checking the facts can have far-reaching consequences -- like influencing voters in a US presidential election, or knocking $4 billion off a company's market cap -- accuracy should count for something. Noughton provides a moral for the tale of the phantom Michelle Obama tape: "If confronted with online rumours, investigate first, report later."

In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of the CNN web site. They also held two CNN-YouTube presidential debates over the summer. The new site, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube, offers many similar features like the ability to rate and discuss videos and embed them elsewhere.

But CNN is far from being the only large media outfit to launch citizen journalism ventures. For example, Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News,and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine, too.

Apparently, YouTube now wants to bring some of the focus on citizen journalism back to their site, where so many of today's citizen journalists post and share their work.

About Citizen News

On the introductory post, Olivia writes (and posts a video of course - see below):

"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold." 

Even if you're not a citizen journalist yourself, but you just happen to stumble across some excellent citizen journalism on YouTube, she wants to know. She's also interested in knowing how YouTube can serve citizen journalists even better and she asked for all thoughts, questions, and other feedback to be sent to citizennews@youtube.com.

In the video below, Olivia introduces Citizen News and gives examples of the types of reporting they're looking for, which can include everything from university newscasts to citizen journalism straight out of Sudan:

What better way to pull together the bits of a story has has been "reported over the years" than by using links to the actual reporting, asked Karp. The traditional media method would be to summarize the previous reporting, said Karp, "but on the web, with its infinite space and connectedness, the Times could have added an important supplement to their own perspective" by linking.

Unfortunately, a quick search through Google News archives reveals that much of the important historical content is stuck behind pay walls -- the rationale being that old news doesn't get enough page views to monetize with advertising and is only of value to people researching a story, who are likely willing to pay for access. But as the New York Times' public editor pointed out, sometimes historical context is helpful. But is framing significant historical reporting around current events and using links to the actual reporting to build a readable trail really journalism?

The Drudge Report, seen here in 2006, has been doing 'link journalism' for over a decade.

This sort of reporting is something that bloggers and others on the web have been doing for years. One of the best known examples is The Drudge Report, which has been putting out link-based reporting since the mid-90s. By organizing links to other original reporting, Matt Drudge has really pioneered a type of online news that is something like the web-based equivalent of a paper that carries only wire stories, and does no original reporting.

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they're being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

According to Wikipedia, "Journalism is the discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles." Karp's link journalism falls at least into the "gathering" and "editing" pieces of that. It's certainly not on the same level as original reporting -- which link journalism relies on completely -- but it does have an important place, and I hope newspapers are listening to Karp's call to tear down pay walls and start recycling relevant historical content by utilizing links. And not just to their own reporting, but to any reporting that could add value for the reader.

There is, of course, one major hurdle in the way of convincing newspapers that this is a smart thing to do: the mainstream press doesn't like to send people away from their web sites. To that, Karp responds, "Just remember Google’s law of links on the web -- the better job you do at sending people away, the more they come back."

It is the distributed nature of Twitter that makes it such a powerful tool for citizen journalism. Not only can Twitter be used by individuals to push news out to people quickly and as it happens, but it can also be used to crowdsource the process of gathering information. One of the best examples of this in action is Commuter Feed.

Commuter Feed, which launched last week, is a Twitter mashup that plays off the distributed nature of the app to aggregate traffic reports. It works by asking users to tweet traffic updates at a Twitter robot along with an IATA airport code (used to designate the city where the post is originating) and then parses those traffic updates to the correct city. For example, "@commuter PDX Trailer overturned at exit 10 on I-84" would parse to Portland, Oregon. Each metro then gets its own page and its own RSS feed.

Commuter Feed works by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd and the more people that use it, the more accurate and up-to-date the information can be. "Commuter Feed's dependence on the community changes the commuting landscape for an instant, personal account of what to expect on the way to and from home," said the company in a press release.

As Webware's Josh Lowensohn notes, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! all have real-time traffic overlays on their mapping products. But my guess is that if you have enough penetration in your metro, Commuter Feed might end up being more timely and on top of current conditions. We saw with the California wildfires last fall that often times it was citizen journalists reporting on the scene that scooped the mainstream press. There can only be so many traffic helicopters and government officials reporting traffic conditions, but there is an almost unlimited number of commuters on the roads and armed with cell phones. Of course, I hope they're not tweeting while driving!

How else would you like to see Commuter Feed's localized information gathering and distribution model applied? What other types of information and news do you think could benefit from this sort of set up? Let us know in the comments.

The new site, according to Mediaweek who got an advanced look at the site, will be completely open in terms of what users can upload. Users will be in charge of deciding what constitutes news, and which submissions should be removed from the site. "The community will decide what the news is," CNN News EVP Susan Grant told Mediaweek. "We are not going to discourage or encourage anything -- iReport will be completely unvetted." (Though CNN will monitor the site for inappropriate content.)

Mediaweek says that the new site will look and feel a lot like YouTube and will also feature the usual community features, such as the ability to rate and discuss videos, and embed them on other pages.

CNN recently paid $750,000 for the domain names "ireport.com" and "i-report.com," so this is clearly something they are serious about. And they should be. As we've noted in the past, citizen journalism is fast growing in importance. The only way to keep up with a shrinking news cycle, is to have distributed reporting capable of capturing breaking news as it happens. Often times, the people best suited to report breaking news are amateurs. CNN saw that happen with last year's California wild fires, when much of their most compelling footage came in via i-Report.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Accuracy is a potential concern for CNN, who have had editors vetting users submissions before allowing them on the web. CNN's Susan Grant said the network will be clear about labeling the new iReport site as a "post-moderated site" (i.e., moderated after posting, rather than before) and that the views put forth in videos uploaded to the site don't necessarily reflect those of CNN.

But accuracy concerns aside, not embracing citizen journalists, or at the very least their tools and methods, seems to be something that the mainstream media can't afford to do. As Scott Karp says, "The news business -- and the journalism it supports -- can no longer afford to wait for innovation to happen in due time. It needs to happen NOW."

The N95, as readers of this blog will recall, is also being used by Reuters as part of a "Mobile Journalism Toolkit," which some Reuters field reporters are testing to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone's camera to take photos and videos of news events. This is all part of a growing trend toward legitimizing citizen journalism and the embrace by mainstream media of amateur journalism's tools and techniques.

"'Citizen journalism' is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media," said Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center when the mobile toolkit was announced, "from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."

Yesterday we wrote about Twitter's growing influence in the reporting of news and its use by mainstream news reporters as an information distribution tool. It is interesting that while MTV is building technology to instantly stream live mobile video reports from amateur reporters in 23 states, they're apparently not planning to use Twitter. Those reporters will have cell phones, afterall, making them more than capable of Twittering.

MTV has actually used Twitter before. About 4 months ago during the Video Music Awards, MTV set up a handful of Twitter accounts to stream live updates from the awards show floor. Though it featured mostly inane updates from artists and hosts, like Lil' Wayne saying, "Yo we just left the awards It was crazzzzy," it at least shows that MTV is open to trying out new tools to push information to users. Though their Twitter experiment at the VMAs resulted in sub-par content (in my opinion), it was a modest success, attracting almost 1500 followers on their main account.

Twitter or not, though, MTV's emphasis on streaming mobile video next Tuesday, and their continued use of amateur journalists during the 2008 election cycle is part of a growing trend that is pushing citizen journalism into the mainstream and increasing its impact on how we report and consume news.

Patrick Ruffini over at TechPresident thinks this could be the year of Twitter. He cites downtime that Twitter recently experience when two major news events overloaded the service, Macworld and the US State of the Union address, as evidence of the service's potential mainstream appeal. "While these spikes reveal some troubling capacity issues that Twitter will need to deal with, this is the surest sign that the service has gone mainstream in a way not anticipated by its founders," writes Ruffini.

Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.

Why Twitter Works for News

It's fast. Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads. For example, Ana Marie Cox, the Washington Editor of Time.com, maintains a Twitter account that is both informative and hilarious. As we recently reported John Dickerson, a political correspondent for Slate, uses Twitter to report from the US presidential campaign trail in near real-time. "It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room," says Dickerson of Twitter, which has a visceral nature that reporters are beginning to embrace.

It's open. By embracing an open API architecture from the start, Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.

The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.

It's two-way. Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation. Like its new media brethren, blogs, Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.

It fills a void. As Ruffini points out, Twitter is built for the new news cycle. "Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds," he writes. "It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."

Some Hurdles to Twitter Discourse

Sometimes, it's too fast. Twitter happens in moments. If you think keeping up with the blogging cycle at big blogs like Engadget is tough, then keeping up with a thousand voices on Twitter is damn near impossible. For the tech-obsessed -- the people like you and I who are on their computers all day already -- keeping tabs on Twitter could easily become part of the routine. But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.

Third-party clients like Twitterific can help filter to a certain extent, but they're not perfect.

It can be muddled. One of the strengths of Twitter is that it is a two-way street -- you an talk back to the people who are talking to you. But it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.

One recent attempt is Tweetmeme, a Twitter memetracker based on the concept of Techmeme. It works relatively well at figuring out what people are linking to on Twitter, but isn't well suited to figuring out what people are talking about, and separating out those individual discussions (plus, it doesn't filter for language, which can make it a bit confusing if you're not multi-lingual).

It's hard to navigate. There is a learning curve to Twitter. Finding people isn't as easy as it should be (certainly not as easy as on mainstream social networks like MySpace or Facebook, which people are used to), and figuring out who to follow to get involved in the conversations you want to take part in requires some work as well.

Conclusion

Despite some potential hurdles, Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.

With citizen journalism on the rise, it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs. Twitter won't replace blogging or newspapers, but as Ruffini says, it "open sources the process of developing ideas and gathering news tips, giving us a complete window onto the news cycle."

According Dickerson, tools like Twitter provide a way for reporters to disseminate information quickly while a story may still be unfolding. "It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room," he says, describing Twitter reporting the way someone might a live television newscast.

In another piece, the NYT writes about blogger Michael Yon, who uses his blog to cover the Iraq war from the front lines. "Michael Yon was not a journalist, and he wasn’t sure what a blogger was," the piece begins. But after spending more time embedded with US soldiers in Iraq than any other journalist, and writing about his experience on his web site, Yon "has recently, grudgingly, accepted that he has become a journalist."

The Times praises Yon's reporting, who went to Iraq because he thought the mainstream media was "bungling the story."

"Along the way, he created a niche outlet that is better reported than most blogs, and more opinionated than most news reporting, with enough first-hand observation, clarity and skepticism to put many professional journalists to shame," writes Richard Perez-Pena. "The Internet has fostered such citizen journalism, shaking up ideas about where news comes from, but few have taken on the expense and danger of working in a war zone."

The story notes that bloggers and citizen journalists have swelled in ranks in Iraq, while the number of mainstream journalists operating there has shrunk, putting added emphasis on the reporting that amateurs are doing.

The New York Times itself has experimented in recent months with running content from amateur journalists. We reported last month that the paper would begin running videos produced by an amateur production company about the US presidential race, and since October it has run a series of video debates from Bloggingheads.tv. They also recently sponsored the Polling Places project, which uses contributions from readers to document polling places on film during the 2008 US elections.

The rise of tools like Twitter and blogs to report on events as they happen is something we recently predicted will be a growing trend in the coming year. Stories like those in today's New York Times help validate citizen journalists and the tools they use as legitimate methods of reporting breaking news.