Benelux mainstream media seem to discover Twitter. Hosts on tv and radio don’t really see what’s the fuzz about but at least they acknowledge something is going on.
Belgian Radio 1 did a little experiment where godmother of Belgian Blogosphere Bnox tweeted following message:
“I swear I saw Vincent Van Quickenborne and radio journalist Annemie Peeters holding hands and drowning in each other’s eyes last night!”
Vincent Van Quickenborne is a Belgian minister and the idea was to investigate how fast this message would spread. Would any of the print media fall for the rumor? Only three hours after the tweet, a journalist of Het Belang Van Limburg called radio host Annemie Peeters to comment the rumor. None of the Belgian dailies brought the ‘news’.
The experiment ‘succeeded’ because one if its most influential members made a statement that could cost her some credibility. Twitter is like a pub or a coffee corner in a company. Nothing more nothing less. Apparently journalists treat Twitter like in that way andthe news wasn’t published in any of the dailies. All in all no shocking results for a pretty lame experiment imho. (Listen to the broadcast here and here , Thanks @mreys for capturing it! edit: check the interview here!)
Far more interesting was a posting made by freelance journalist Koen Vervloesem. He reconstructed how The Sunday Times reported about a physicist who had calculated the environmental impact of Google searches.
The fact that Google wasn’t even mentioned in the original study is a minor detail. Google’s PR staff spend a day explaining everyone the title of the article was completely wrong. But harm was already done. Media worldwide copied the exact same (completely wrong) story of The Sunday Times.
Maybe the lesson to be learned from the experiment and Vervloesem’s posting is that traditional media aren’t free from sin and journalists should treat them with the same standards they use for Twitter. What do you think?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Interview staat ondertussen op http://soundcloud.com/pladys