Consider the journalism on Twitter, not whether Twitter is journalism

Twitter is a medium and cannot be considered as a whole, writes Alfred Hermida, who's worried that we're about to rehash the old argument about whether a new medium "is journalism."

Rather than arguing about whether Twitter is or isn’t journalism, we should shift the conversation to understanding the journalism taking place on this platform and its relationship to established journalism norms and practices.

The problem that I've seen is that journalists try to categorize Twitter as one thing, but that's like trying to categorize all magazines as one thing, like lumping Teen Beat with the Economist. Media aren't flat and easy to summarize; they are faceted and full of niches where many interests (and products) take hold.

Related posts:

1. What Twitter did for crisis journalism today
2. Why hasn’t Twitter caught on with teens?
3. A frightening idea: Twitter becomes the News System of the World
4. Building a Twitter strategy
5. Jarvis criticizes NYT’s Cohen for his dismissal of Twitter