Neil Arun didn’t want to miss a rare but risky opportunity to embed with an Iraqi police unit, hunting members of al Qaeda. But his employers -- responsible for Neil’s security -- weren’t happy. This film by Richard Pendry nvestigates how a frontline journalist balances risk and reward.
About the Twitter thing. I think I'm with Jon Stewart on this one.
I have to say that this little debate you have going on tickled my curiosity...I wasn't a member of Twitter until about 5 minutes ago and to be frank, the first page that came up when I joined referred to it as a site for friends to keep up with each others lives!
Sounds just like another alternative to facebook or bebo if you ask me?
I agree with Jaak and Alan; it's something that can enhance the work of journalists if used to their advantage and in that sense it's useful.
But if it's just another social networking site you can't expect anything less than people ''tweeting" (or whatever it's called) every 5 minutes about the little things in life!
As a group of people who all use facebook I feel that this debate falls flat on it's face coming from any one of our mouths!
I subscribed a couple of months ago and really should not have wasted the energy. The news feeds are fairly informative if you are glued to your screen as Jaak quite rightly points out, but other than that I have no absolutely no interest in it. Receiving text alerts works in theory, but at a cost? No thanks. There are plenty of other available resources through 3G, you might as well just check the BBC or Sky website outright, without the unnecessary third party.
Yeah, it's pretty sad that some people spend their whole lives constantly telling the world about all the trivial, uninteresting things they are doing. Great concept.
I don't think we should dismiss it as completely trivial. Some news stories have broke on Twitter (such as the Mumbai attacks) and the first picture of the plane that crashed into the Hudson in January was posted on Twitter. People will post random tweets that dont have much use (e.g. I've just eaten some toast), but I do think it has its uses.
It could also be said that updating your Facebook status is "sad". Therefore the majority of students on our course fall under this category, including you.
I'll admit I update my Twitter with useless updates, but it sometimes allows other people to find me. I've also talked to some highly regarded journalists as a result. Now I'm going to go and tweet Sky's online editor, Jon Gripton, a recipe over Twitter...
Granted, the video is amusing and true in some respects.
p.s. It's also nice for travel journalism - The Guardian experimented with this. It has some uses.
Could not agree more. To me, the idea of having 140 character 'conversations' or information-bleeps, that I farted or woke up, is dumb. I understand, that the twitter.com medium is a network with world-wide capabilities, that can be used to a great length by us journalists. But that doesnt mean we have to like it. The main problem is, that the large majority (VAST MAJORITY) of twitter users adapt their life (or lack of one) to their twitter-feeds, which - if you'd step away from the monitor for a few minutes and think about what you're doing - doesnt really matter to anyone, including you.
Great idea, due to its large user base and speed of 'viral news'. Pathetic, because the journalistic side that could be used is basically heresay and, for the most part and most importantly, uncheckable for a significant time period. Twitter is good for sad people to feel happier, tweet at a time, that they can display their friends online and compare their e-penis.. Oh, sorry, e-friend size. There are many other social networking sites, that can do the same thing. As for contacting 'with speed' - to me, it's same as writing an email on speed. 140 character limitation, increasing 'dumbing it down' and general idiotic things said, does not mean it's a faster and better way to communicate.
On the other hand, our generation's attention spam is the same as an average monkey, so it can not be blamed on our modern 'inventors' for finding 140 character beeps/bleeps/tweets or free SMS offers so profiting (inc. advertising, increased rates on everything else you do, required services and limitations - if any complaints, the aforementioned generation should refer to the provided general terms and acceptance license, all further complaints are ignored, emails deleted and normal mails used to heat the houses of poor people).
In short: twitter sucks.