Today in TechTwitter may be the first to break stories, but few use it for news
All indications point to Twitter being the place to learn about breaking news, often before even major news networks pick up on the fact. A random man wound up unknowingly live-blogging the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, long before the mainstream media picked up on it. Twitter was also first to report on Whitney Houston's death. But is that how most users are leveraging Twitter? All signs point to "no."
A recent study from the Pew Research Center shows that only 9% of Twitter users get their news from the microblogging site, as compared to 36% who use news websites, 32% who use search engines, and 29% who use news aggregation sites. And when news is shared via Twitter or Facebook, it's usually stories that are more unusual and "viral" in nature.
Why aren't more people relying on Twitter for their news? Probably because the social networking site is still something of an electronic wild west — it's hard to know what's real on Twitter and what isn't. After all, Twitter was the first to break the news of Jon Bon Jovi's death... despite, of course, the fact that he's still very much alive.
State of the Media via The Verge
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
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