Week Four Post

In Dave Kindred’s article, he argues that live-tweeting and live-blogging games “lose effectiveness.” When writers spend more time making sure that they’re catching every soundbite and every detail, they miss the big picture, and the story the audience wants to hear.

These are two different audiences, and media outlets are assuming they are one. One audience, the diehards, the one who want every minute detail from the clubhouse, and will criticize over the timeliness of the published lineup card, and want the beat writer’s focus to be solely on the live-blogging and live-tweeting.

It exhausts the writers, as both authors argue, and dilutes the quality of journalism being published in article or long form. The stories are sliced, as Moran points out, from long, researched, detailed articles, to snippets that can be boiled into 140 characters. Technology, specifically Twitter, has altered the way news is presented. After seeing a live tweet, or breaking news story on Twitter, a consumer with the short attention-span of today’s reader will hardly ever return to the actual website to call on the full article to garner key details that can’t fit in a 140-character message.

Producing these “key fragments of information” are now more important than the stories themselves. Conciseness and speed are now the most important factors when reporting a story—forget accuracy and detail. It’s about breaking the story first, and breaking it in under 140 characters. Because even if you do the research, you write the article, you get it up first, someone will disseminate it faster using that 140-character limit. The focus is no longer on the importance of the story, and has instead been shifting onto the speed of dissemination, at a cost to the writer, as live-blogging and live-tweeting allow for.