Criticisms of the value of Twitter post-Mumbai from the Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe:

“Twitterers are hair-trigger communicators, and presumably absolutely itching to get something of substance into their despatches. Whereas a journalist has a reasonably strong incentive not to broadcast misleading or dubious information, because such an eventuality would come with a professional cost, a Twitterer owes no duty except to their own impressions and their own state of mind. They’ll pass on rumour as readily as fact, and there’s absolutely no way of telling which is which.”

As someone who has been a journalist and is now a Twitterer this piece from Tom Sutcliffe is certainly worth a look. Fact is though journalists have their own form of built-in bias, of a more sophisticated sort no doubt.