Since the invention of the Internet, the rate at which the media churns out news has been increasing at an extremely rapid pace.
In the early years people could get news briefs on their home page when they logged into their AOL or Yahoo! account.
That pace increased exponentially when Twitter made its way into our lives in 2006.
Media outlets ranging from the highly respected CNN and Fox News to celebrity gossip hubs such as TMZ and Star Magazine have since joined the social networking site, constantly filling the Twitter feeds with 140 characters worth of news.
As journalists, we enjoy reading and writing full stories.
Stories that are thoroughly investigated, stories whose sources are interviewed with skill and stories that have as few errors as possible.
We feel that all this “fast news” does is depreciate the value of real news.
We understand the difference between breaking news and an update story, but an update should not come every 15 minutes because the story was not complete the first time it was published.
As for the homepages of AOL, Yahoo! And MSN they are often filled with links to smaller web publications which have stories about what we call “non-news.”
They have eye-catching headlines which pull in the reader but the stories are usually not as interesting or half-baked.
Instead of captivating readers or informing them of things which are relevant or important, these stories are nothing more than trivial bits of nonsense that tempt readers with suggestive titles.
Titles include the “Right Way to Hang Christmas Lights,” which links to a video of an “expert,” and the “Best Celebrity Bodies of 2010.”
Good news should be measured by the quality of the writing and reporting, not by the amount of hits the link gets or how quickly it posts up on someones feed.
And with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone constantly bringing up the idea of a “Twitter newswire,” the future of full-length articles seems even more doomed.
The news may be reduced to short blurbs with little fact because news outlets will be concerned with whose tweets pull in the most readers. Instead of full length factual stories that are fact checked and express stories to their full potential.
We hope that the media will soon see the light and use Twitter to pull readers in to their full-length stories.
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.