2. Twitter is real time – I don’t have to wait whilst the corporate determines which medium it will realese stories through, in order to control information and maximise advertising or circulation revenues

3. Twitter gives the journo an ability to market their personal brand at no cost and build a bigger following (reach) than they otherwise could do, or afford. The media should support this, even facilitate by having social media managers who do marketing through these channels.

4. Major news media should read “The Long Tail” and realise that they should produce higher quality category content, more similar to investigative journalism. The 80/20 rule still applies to high quality content, the long tail facilitates speed, not accuracy or quality…just yet.

5. Twitter, along with all internet tools is empowering society. “The World is Flat” rule, applies to everyone and everything. Scale only wins where scale matters, and in the business of ‘daily news’, media control over what is ‘news’ no longer happens at the corporate editors table. They need to realise, power over what is news has shifted to the hands of the user. I can get the content, I can choose to read it, dig deeper, or move on….to another source, who may be more qualified in the field of forensics, or psychology, or chinese medicine…get the point.

Which simply supports the recommendation….make your journalists recognised and trusted sources of high quality journalism. They should have twitter accounts that have more followers than Ashton Kutcher and Ellen De Generes, who by the way, reach more followers than the audience of any Autralian news media print, tv or otherwise. They are a media ! And twitter is their distribution channel.

Society is not changing, people have always created communities of interest that have bonded together to create a voice – ‘special interest groups’. Connecting and creating that voice is much easier and all they use/need is Twitter and a search engine with a forum, not NewsLtd or PBL or Fairfax.

Someone needs to advise the $600k+ a year execuitves of major news media that the tools of business that used to create barriers to entry DO NOT EXIST. Otherwise they will be recorded in history as the metaphorical captains of the corporate titanics – WAKE UP !!!

And they wonder why traditional newspapers are losing revenue to online.

Additionally, we do not know whether Mr Reid’s objections lie in the actual tweets or tweets without hyperlinks back to the articles.

People do like to follow their favourite journalists in print and on twitter – it draws them into reading it. the NY Times (NYT) and the US seem to have a better attitude towards social media in this area. @pogue is the tech writer for the NY Times and has like a million followers, and whenever he tweets and links to NY times articles, he brings in thousands of visitors to the website. newspapers should see this as an opportunity.

also, NY Times has a social media function on their website called Times People which I’ve been using – its a bit like Digg. I can follow Journalists on the website and they can recommend NYT articles.

More likely they’re just observing it and uncomfortable because they’re wondering whether they’re paying people to do anything other than write news. At the end of the day, News thinks about its relationship with journalists in quite a linear, direct relationship between words in a news story and take-home pay.

They don’t understand that building a personal brand around a journalist is a cheap way of investing in and owning the production of a future media megastar. Instead of buying-in massively overpaid columnists as The Australian and Daily Tele do, they could be growing them in-house and paying much less for them by allowing them to tweet.

As Stephen says, nobody’s going to report the news in <200 chars, but they might tweet a link to a news story they’ve just broken and drive a few thousand pageviews to it, which would cost News Ltd almost nothing.

They’re good for a newspaper.

Dim-witted Luddites in management are not, IMHO, necessarily good for a newspaper.

My own view is that Twitter is a smart way of alerting people to articles – banning it would be a wasted opportunity for any media company.