Is it time for political journalists to change their behavior on Twitter?

muckrack:

A recent New York Times article revealed that politicians are using Twitter to monitor the press, raising the question should political journalists change their behavior on Twitter?

The article, written by Ashley Parker of The New York Times, describes how Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign staff uses Twitter to not only engage with constituents but also to monitor reporters. Michael Falcone of the ABC News summed up well with this tweet, “Romney camp treats Twitter as an “early warning signal” for bad press.”

Parker writes “Mr. Romney’s aides say they can get a sense of where a story is headed before it is published simply by reading reporters’ Twitter messages.” His aides collect tweets sent from the press corps and use them to prep Romney for possible questions at press conferences. The staff also engages with reporters directly, sending “Twitter-inspired lecture[s], ranging from a simple “not cool” to something angrier,” Parker writes.

This could be a game changer for reporters covering the debates and elections. If candidates’ aides are monitoring their movements on Twitter this closely (perhaps using Muck Rack Pro), reporters could be giving their hand away to campaign staffs without even knowing it. With many reporters just getting used to covering debates and political campaigns on Twitter, however, it could be hard for them to adopt even newer tweeting practices. 

What do you think? Should journalists be cognizant of the fact that campaign staffs are monitoring their tweets and alter their behavior or proceed as normal?

“Mr. Murdoch may not know much about computers, but he has an intuitive understanding of how Twitter is supposed to work. By mixing the personal and political, propaganda and plain old rants, he is serving his interests and the interests of his company. He will no doubt make some missteps — two days after he started tweeting, he caused an uproar when he called Britain a “broke country” — but in general, his embrace of social media has gone well. (It will be interesting to see if Mr. Murdoch does some Twitter spinning the next time News Corporation hits a rough patch in the hacking scandal.)

After a month of reading Mr. Murdoch’s posts, I have to say there’s something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it.

He’s even managed to express some humility amid the bravado. “Many questions and jokes about My Space. simple answer — we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.”

“80-yr-old wanders into Twitterdome … and acquits himself nicely.” - @carr2n’s (David Carr) column on @RupertMurdoch. - NYTimes

Teens migrating to Twitter _ sometimes for privacy

Teens don’t tweet, will never tweet - too public, too many older users. Not cool.

That’s been the prediction for a while now, born of numbers showing that fewer than one in 10 teens were using Twitter early on.

But then their parents, grandparents, neighbors, parents’ friends and anyone in-between started friending them on Facebook, the social networking site of choice for many - and a curious thing began to happen.

Suddenly, their space wasn’t just theirs anymore. So more young people have started shifting to Twitter, almost hiding in plain sight.

“I love twitter, it’s the only thing I have to myself … cause my parents don’t have one,” Britteny Praznik, a 17-year-old who lives outside Milwaukee, gleefully tweeted recently.

“Every so often, a college newspaper is thrust into the national spotlight. For The Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech University, this has happened twice in recent years — once in 2007 when a gunman opened fire and killed 33 people, including himself, in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

[…]

Within a few hours, the paper’s Twitter following grew by more than 18,000 — to more than 20,000 from 2,000 just before the news broke. The growth shows just how Twitter can amplify a single message, or a single account, even if that account is a college newspaper without a local following.”

Using Twitter, Virginia Tech’s College Newspaper Kept on Publishing - NYTimes.com
  • The New York Times