How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces.
I did an interview on the BBC last week with some traditional journalists about Twitter and they scoffed at the idea that it could be useful. "Well," one said after I talked about how we’ve used it, "I certainly won’t be checking it out." Hmph!
The scoffers can scoff all they want, but here at RWW our use of Twitter so far has included:
BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.
New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.
How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on 
