Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? - Columbia Journalism Review

This is an important and interesting question. When I read the headline the immediate thought in my head was "Yes!". The study goes into more detail and gets deeper into the impact it would have on reporting.

“Our results indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment,” the researchers write. “For journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications.” Among those implications, they argue, is that journalists can get caught up in a kind of pack mentality in which a story is seen as important because other journalists on Twitter are talking about it, rather than because it is newsworthy.

The "firehose" feed of Twitter is something that some people find uninteresting, but there are some people and professions that I think find it highly addictive and compelling. Watching an AP news feed, or a financial ticker, feels and looks a lot like watching the Twitter timeline. I count myself in the group of people that find that addictive. I tend to think journalists as a group would too.