Comment by imok20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imok20 | Hacker News Reader

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While I completely agree, and upvoted you for it, I think the implication of this is more along the lines of "whoa, the NYT is no longer the formost producer of breaking news (mostly.)"

The NYT should focus more on investigative reporting and analysis, and Twitter should stick to being about getting information out there as fast as people can type. To each it's own, right?

EDIT: To those who downvote, I'm curious as to why you did; this makes a lot of sense to me, and I'd like to hear contrasting opinions.

EDIT2: I think I must not have been clear at all: I agree with the OP. Completely. I'm just saying that no, the NYT doesn't care about getting out information as soon as possible. BNO does, that's why they're slightly better than the NYT at it. Twitter delivers a little bit of news in small bites – for some, that isn't sufficient (and it isn't for me either, though Twitter is a nice heads-up for when I'm not watching the news). But bites of news can be transmitted in 140 characters, or at the very least they can contain links to news (such as, again, BNO's links.) I don't see the controversy here, but I suppose that must be the Twitter kool-aid.

A minute later, at 2:54 p.m., the news was in the Breaking News Twitter feed. Two minutes later, at 2:56 p.m., the New York Times had the news in its Twitter feed, and word of the result buzzed into my phone via the Breaking News app. Three minutes after that, at exactly 2:59 p.m., the NYTimes.com news alert showed up in my email inbox

All of this happened in a span of time shorter than the interval at which most email clients check for new mail. I think the case against NYT here is overstated. And this news was about the outcome of a sporting event which is exactly one bit of information which becomes available at a predictable time. Basically it comes down to who can hit the button faster. When real news happens (a natural disaster, an assassination) it will take at least those few minutes to figure out WTF happened and write it up.

I didn't down vote you (I actually up voted you because I felt bad) but I could guess as to why others would.

A tweet is not news. So to say "the NYT is no longer the formost producer of breaking news" comes across kind of obnoxious to those not drinking the Twitter kool-aid. I mean, I've been able to get sports scores texted to my phone for at least a decade now but I don't recall anyone saying "text messaging had replaced news organizations as the foremost producer of breaking news"

Beyond that, and this is one of my own personal pet peeves, Twitter doesn't "report news" well. Sure a sports score is easy but on everything else it doesn't really shine.

See here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/2008/05/Twitter-News-Short2c-In...

And here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/Twitter-and-the-Earthquake.aspx

And here: http://tomstechblog.com/post/Twitter-Again-Really!!.aspx

(I have MUCH more but decided to stop at 3)

Well, there is only so much context you can give in 140 characters regarding the national importance (to Canada) that the game had and the significance of winning the gold in their national sport.

If you actually cared about who won, you watched the game, and probably knew before Twitter could tell you.

I believe this has more to do with Canada beating the US than people surprised at Twitter being able to break news faster then the NYTimes. The latter would of been news in 2008.

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