Monday, February 21, 2011

CNN is citing Twitter?

Watson beats humans. Yes, we all know the story by now. But CNN posted a story about it and at the end, cited reactions from "Twitter users." That's right, they wrote, "Several Twitter users were awed by the computer's smarts."

How is this any form of journalism? If they wrote, "several random people on the street were awed by Watson," you'd think, who cares? Why should we care what "several Twitter users" think? Are they even real people?

I don't read CNN that often - do they do this frequently?

2 comments:

PJ said...

I don't read CNN either, but I'll point out that the way this article quoted Twitter users is analogous to simply quoting random people from the street, which is fairly standard for human interest articles like this.

That being said, it does make you wonder if young journalism majors are lazier than their predecessors.

Blogman said...

I thought about this but would argue that while you can find almost any opinion in "the street," at least you know it's a real person. And "the street" also means it's a person in a certain place. Random Twitter users tells you very little about the writer.