The Fix
by Chris Cillizza
November 7 at 3:38 pm (The Washington Post)
Twitter is now a publicly traded stock. But long before any Tom, Dick or Harry (or Ron) could buy stock in Twitter, the micro-blogging service was in the process of fundamentally reshaping the way in which politics is practiced and covered. The changes, which are still in process, are profound — in the way that politicians interact (or don’t) with reporters, the life cycle of news cycles and how the general public gets (or doesn’t) its information.
CNN’s Peter Hamby has done what we take to be the definitive work in this space in a paper entitled “Did Twitter kill the Boys on the Bus?” that he wrote during a semester as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hamby’s paper runs 95 pages. You should read the whole thing, but in the event you don’t, here are the key quotes from it as well as a few of our own thoughts.
* “It’s become the new conventional wisdom setter, and that conventional wisdom gets amplified as well, because you have editors sitting in bureaus watching this stuff. When everything is in 140 characters, it gives a skewed version of reality, and that impacts how editors think about what reporters should be covering, and it impacts what reporters think is important.” ... MORE
Related