In the last year, Twitter has become a go-to social network for journalists either looking to research stories or ways to distribute their content online. News organizations, like Newsweek and Sky News, have amply incorporated tweets into their newsrooms and news stories, and last month, we learned that the NYT stories get tweeted at a remarkable rate of once every 4 seconds.

However, Twitter's status as a hybrid of social networking and news site has led some journalists to conduct themselves a bit more casually than they usually would on other media.

This week, Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, Matt Winkler, expressed his concern for how some of the financial news and data company's journalists were phrasing their breaking news posts on Twitter, according to an exclusive from Talking Biz News.

In a note to staff, Winkler criticized some of the staff's tweets at a congressional hearing, writing that "at Bloomberg News, the three most important words are accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy."

Talking Biz News reports that Winkler singled out a number of tweets that appeared on Bloomberg.com at the Goldman Sachs Senate hearing. One of them read, "Blanfkein working hard not to start the head-bobbing thing. He was so upset/vehement at the FCIC hearing he kept bobbing his head." Another one criticizes Senator Carl Levin's demeanor and asks, "Is Levin too cranky by half? Wonder if he's making GS boys sympathetic characters."

Winkler's note explains that these tweets are opinions that can't be verified or proved and therefore, should not appear on the journalist's tweets.

His note is a reminder that journalists, even on a platform like Twitter, must remain as truthful and as objective as possible.

For journalists, balancing Twitter's advantages and disadvatages can be challenging. While the social network and microblogging site can serve as a useful tool to find and research stories as well as engaging readers, maintaining journalistic integrity when writing 140-character tweets and verifying sources can prove to be a difficult task.

Last month, various newspapers in the UK used Twitter as a news tool to report on allegations of marital woes between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni that turned out to be false. In 2009, two UK students posed as UK foreign secretary David Miliband and tricked the Guardian, AFP, the Times, and the Telegraph into believing their tweet about Michael Jackson.

Sources: Talking Biz News, Poynter