Is Twitter a useful tool for journalists?

ABSTRACT

This article is a critical reflection on the question of whether Twitter is a useful tool for journalists, based on close observation of The Guardian. It begins with a practice-based anthropology. Focusing on coverage of the G20 protests and other activities in 2009, it demonstrates that Twitter is a useful marketing and research tool for newspaper websites — one that supplements the traditional role of journalists as investigators and providers of timely information on news events.

The article then adopts a cultural materialist or Gramscian framework in which journalism's role in relation to the dominant ideology of contemporary capitalism is considered. In particular, it scrutinizes the hegemonic construction of Twitter within media discourse using close textual analysis of journalistic reports and features. Perhaps an equally important question to the one posed in the title, the article concludes, is whether or not journalism will become a useful ‘tool’ for Twitter.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• journalism
• information
• capitalism
• technology
• The Guardian