Breaking News On Twitter

By: Sarah Jones

In todays culture information can spread like wildfire. In a matter of seconds breaking news, of any kind, spreads from household to household but not by the way of traditional media. In recent years Twitter has become a news source for social media savvy individuals. Twitter is a social media platform that relies heavily on conversation and it's a great tool for reaching a huge amount of people quickly. Not only does it reach the public, but the public has also been known to join the effort in allowing others to know what is happening the moment it is happening. For these reasons, Twitter is the place that reporters go to keep audiences up-to-date on what is happening in the world around them. Since the amount of people who use Twitter to receive and report breaking news is high, Twitter has even given techniques on how to cover breaking news events on its platform.

For a lot of people Twitter is the first place they go to find out breaking news because things are happening in real time. No one has to wait for the 10 o'clock news or for the edition of the paper to arrive on his or her front doors the next morning. Although many news stations have reporters that blog on a breaking news event and post them directly to their websites, it doesn't have the same timely factor as Twitter. On Twitter not only does the public get the basic rundown of the event, they also get to read what other people are saying about it and even weigh in on the topic themselves. However, the public should have caution when getting their news from a social media platform because it's prone to false information by what young people refer to as 'trolls' which are people who cause controversy for fun.

Twitter saw its latest breaking news event on Thursday when a Delta passenger jet slid off the runway at LaGuardia airport in New York caused by ice and snow on the runway. Passengers from the airplane immediately took to Twitter to share the ordeal and reporters from various news organizations began to report on the situation.

Source: Twitter via @steveblaze98

The picture above got thousands of favorites and retweets which goes to show just how fast a tweet can reach multiple people in a short amount of time. Since breaking news travels fast on Twitter, and multiple people are telling different stories, the companies involved in the situation have to be on its game even more. Companies have to control the situation and get the truth out there before the public starts believing everything they're seeing on social media. Also, reporters have to do their job of checking their facts to make sure peoples tweets are legitimate before using them in stories and sharing it to the public. Bottom line, Twitter can be a great place to get and break news if the public follows legitimate news sources and uses common sense when following a major event as it unfolds.