In 2008, in the Twitter blog it was stated that Twitter was a news-wire, numbers being there to prove it.

Andy Carvin, NPR social media guru, since the 2011 Arab Spring has been transforming into a living news-wire, curating tweets and tweeting the Middle East events are they were unfolding. (Here’s more information on the process that Carvin is going through every day.)

The relationship between Twitter and journalism is certainly an important one to address if one is interested in the picture of the world that the news media portrays.

Here are a few broad questions that I think should be addressed from an academic perspective, but not with a focus on single breaking news events:

- is Twitter just another news-wire or something else’s for journalists?

- what are the noticeable differences of Twitter uses across the news industry? 

- apart from Andy Carvin’s example, are they examples of extensive curation in the industry? how to they distinguish themselves from “traditional journalism”?

- etc.

I would be more than interested to read, or perhaps take part, of cross-country studies on the impact of Twitter on journalisms.

The question should address more than specific breaking news events and we should look at what journalists actually do.