Twitter users publish something like half a billion tweets per day. Even if 99.999 percent of those tweets are unimportant or nonsense, that leaves 5,000 tweets per day that are potentially newsworthy, or at least noteworthy.
Our mission is to find those hidden nuggets and report on them to you, our readers.
We’ve been at it for a year as of today. Has our Twitter-based news-gathering model proven a success?
We believe our record speaks for itself:
- We documented tweets and retweets by dozens of left-wing Hollywood cranks, including Cher, Alec Baldwin, Jim Carrey, Russell Crowe, Chris Rock, Jason Biggs, Samuel Jackson, Ellen Barkin, Eva Longoria, and Eliza Dushku.
- We were among the first to uncover Twitter riot threats and vandalism by Obama supporters in the run-up to Election Day (see also here).
- We broke a story about Twitter death threats made against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a story that led to an investigation by law-enforcement authorities.
- We caught mainstream media outlets lying about the Newtown, Conn., so-called “hecklers” and the health insurance situation of the former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden.
- We were the first to report details about Aurora, Colo., shooting victim Jessica Ghawi, who was tweeting just before she was shot and was present at a separate mall shooting six weeks earlier.
- Utilizing tweets, photos, and videos posted to Twitter, we were able to cover breaking news — from school shootings in the US to protests in Egypt to an NFL’s player’s homicide-suicide — faster (and in some cases better) than MSM outlets.
MSM dinosaurs consider our methods irresponsible. They insist that “real reporters” must wait around for government officials to confirm facts that are already widely known to anyone using Twitter.
Sorry, MSM, we don’t follow your rules. We have created a news model that allows people to read information that gatekeepers don’t want them to know. Our motto is “who said what.” Their motto is “which official source said what, and we’ll let you know when we’re good and ready.”
Do we make mistakes? Of course. Who doesn’t? And when errors are brought to our attention, we run straightforward corrections. We wish our MSM competitors did the same (see, e.g., here and here).
Twitchy couldn’t be what it is without you: the community of readers, commenters, and tipsters who come to the site every day; the Twitter users who retweet our posts; the Facebook users who “like” and “share” our articles.
Thanks so much to all of you for making our first year a phenomenal success.
Read more: http://twitchy.com/2013/03/07/happy-birthday-to-us/
