Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera and Mediagazer founder Megan McCarthy announced today, on Twitter, that they both news aggregation sites will be including Tweets as headlines going forward.
In July of last year, we speculated that the Techmeme team was considering expanding from solely aggregating news articles to also including Twitter’s 140 character messages.
In a recent post, McCarthy writes, that tweets will appear as headlines when people break news on Twitter and tweets that are commentary on stories will show up as part of the discussion section for that story, along with links to related blog posts and coverage from other news outlets. For an example, see this cluster.
I contacted McCarthy regarding the announcement shortly after.
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CBM: What led you to this decision?
MM: It seemed like an obvious progression. We include short blog posts and news stories in the way we display news, so it makes sense to include shorter news items sent out on Twitter. You can say a lot in less than 140 characters, and this gives us a way to include those thoughts.
CBM: What do you see coming from it?
MM: I foresee more voices being discovered. I think our readers will like having one place to see reaction about different stories from across different publishing mediums – mainstream news outlets, blog posts, Twitter accounts. I hope people will find Mediagazer to be an invaluable resource that clearly shows the bigger picture about the top media news of the day.
This decision gives Twitter a huge boost of power status. It has now become a full fledged broadcast platform. Techmeme and Mediagazer’s decision to include Tweets as headlines means they’re giving each Twitter user the opportunity to become their very own publisher.
Is today the day that 140 character tweets can officially become news sources? Will bloggers tweet breaking news and then spend more time analyzing it in more thoughtful posts? Will Twitter conversations be contenders for headlines?
The news just got a whole lot faster.
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