The news has become more and more entwined with the social networking platform Twitter- both as tweets make the news, and the news is communicated via tweets.
For better or for worse (much more often the latter) the 2016 presidential election has made the connection between Twitter and the news more clear than ever before. Donald Trump is famous for turning to the website to get his thoughts across, and Hillary Clinton recently made waves for facetiously telling him (by means of her own tweet, no less) to delete his Twitter account.
Twitter "tweets" work much the same way as status updates on Facebook: you can post text, pictures or video. To connect to people on Twitter, you follow them. You can follow people unilaterally-that is, they don't have to follow you back in order for you to see what they tweet. However, users can change their settings to have their tweets be "protected," meaning they have to approve of new followers before those new followers can see their tweets. Also, users can "block" Twitter accounts, and thereby prevent those accounts from seeing the blocking user's tweets.
Twitter users can put a hashtag somewhere in their tweet. Hashtags are the same symbol as the pound sign on a phone, followed by a keyword. When you put a hashtag in your tweet, that tweet is now linked with all the other tweets on Twitter that include the hashtag. So if I searched on Twitter for #cats, all the tweets with the hashtag "cats" would appear. The word "hashtag" can refer either to the keyword itself, or the collection of tweets that include the keyword; a dual meaning that outsiders should remember.
Many of the elements that made Twitter unique-unilateral following, hashtags, etc.-were incorporated into Facebook over the years. However, Twitter is still distinct from Facebook in that users can only post exactly 140 characters of text other than web links, or about a sentence's worth of words.
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That constraint means you talk differently on Twitter than you would on Facebook or other places on the web, like blogs. It's a different language, to be sure, but it's the easiest one in the world to learn.
When Twitter became popular in the early 2010s, it was used as a social network, where people talked directly to friends about personal topics. Nowadays, young web users have moved on to apps like SnapChat and WhatsApp for personal conversations. Don't ask me how those work. I've already become too old to know.
But I have been astute enough to notice that Twitter has shifted from being a place for someone to communicate with their friend network to a place where someone communicates with a network of brands, organizations, and governments.
Thus, a fair chunk of Twitter's user base is now made up of journalists like me, and news readers who want up-to-the-second updates that are always more timely than getting your paper or even browsing news websites.
I signed up for Twitter in 2013, and it quickly became the website I go to the most. Like most reporters who use Twitter, I "live-tweet" events, meaning I tweet a play-by-play of what's going on, just moments after it happens.
Being a political reporter, I tend to live tweet government meetings or campaign events. Other reporters live-tweet things like protests, court trials, or hockey games.
There are glaring disadvantages to relying on live-tweets themselves to get your news rather than going to a news outlet's website, however. Live-tweeting constitutes a reporter's unfiltered, knee-jerk thoughts about what's going on, directly copied from their brains and pasted on the world. The tweets haven't been reviewed by an editor to make sure they're journalistically responsible, or a fact checker to make sure they're accurate. They haven't been reviewed by copy editors, to ensure they even make sense semantically.
Our immediate observations of events are often wrong, and that goes for reporters, who get paid to observe things.
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However, tweets of links to news articles constitute a middle ground. That way, you have most of the immediacy and convenience of watching someone live-tweet, combined with the security of knowing what you're looking at has been more carefully thought out, and usually reviewed by an editor.
Follow the right reporters, and you can have only the news you care about, delivered right to you.
ZACH KAYSER may be reached at 218-855-5860 or Zach.Kayser@brainerddispatch.com . Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ZWKayser .
Each Twitter account has a "handle" or address. Below are the handles of the Dispatch news staff-feel free to follow us!
Zach Kayser @ZWKayser
Chelsey Perkins @DispatchChelsey
Spenser Bickett @spenserbickett
Renee Richardson @Dispatchbizbuzz
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Michael Johnson @mj_upnorth
Mike Bialka @bertsballpark
Jeremy Millsop @JeremyMillsop
Pete Mohs @PEJ_Pete
