Extra, extra! Twitter develops newspapers

This new technology could be an asset to journalists.  It places the most talked about stories and ideas all in one place.  Rather than having to sort though the heaps of tweets that come in each second, a journalist can now go straight to his Twitter Tim.es to get ideas for potential stories or for research.  It will also help to promote existing stories.  The promotional aspects of tweeting will increase through the additional visibility within the Twitter Tim.es. 

When asked about the future of news by OJR's Eric Ulken, the Twitter Tim.es' technical lead, Maxim Grinev, said, " I have heard a lot of discussion about media sources dying -- The New York Times has problems, etcetera. Of course, I think that all these major newspapers and magazines are very important, because journalists have the ability to travel places and work at this full-time. But with regard to selecting what I will read... I will find it in my Twitter timeline."

As reported earlier, the new Lists feature allows you to create collections of people to follow within your list of friends.  Twitter has created some themed lists to which you are able to subscribe, or you can simply create your own list or subscribe to those made by other Twitter users.  Lists will help to report news feeds, specific journalists, areas of news, locations of interest, and niche sources.  This will help to create more relevant lists of tweets amongst the clutter.  Lists are public (though they can be made private) and link directly off of your page for others to utilize and possibly subscribe to as well.  

According to Grinev, Twitter is also looking to use lists to build more specialized newspapers in the future, "we are thinking about how to incorporate this. One of the options could be to generate newspapers based on some list. So if you have a list of people, you can collect the second-circle friend-of-friend information and build a newspaper for a list."  This could also be a helpful tool for journalists, one that would allow journalists to build a newspaper based solely around the topic of a story currently being worked on.

In regards to other Twitter and newspaper related innovation, Grinev also told Ulken, "there's an interesting idea we're looking at: When you visit The New York Times website, for example, you might be interested in getting all the links published there, but ranked according to the judgment of your friends and friends of friends. So it's the same as TwitterTim.es, but restricted to a single source -- The New York Times, in this case. We are talking to one major newspaper about this."  

Clearly Twitter will be back in the near future, ready to shake up the world of news reporting once more.

Sources: The Online Journalism Review, CNN, Guardian