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.