When a New Twitter Account is Big News. Or Not?

Honestly, I was very intrigued when I saw the headline in Yahoo News – InfoWorld adds Twitter to its mobile options. It sounded like a big story to me – mainstream media adopting social media tools again, something we can’t stop to admire and so we continue to give them credits whenever they step out of their usual patterns and get to play with out favorite toys.

So I hoped to see a big story there but was there one? Unfortunately no: it is simply a story of creating a new Twitter account. Yes, you’ve read it right: they have signed up for an account on Twitter (that you can now find here if you want to follow it). A whole Yahoo News story on the process of creating a new free account on Twitter.

What is the account intended for? The answer is more obvious than I even hoped for: they will broadcast their headlines to the followers. Fortunately, the intention is not to broadcast absolutely everything (it would have been too cluttered, obviously) – only the key articles hand-picked by editors. Well, they actually promise it can eventually become the place to connect readers with editors so that anyone could participate in the discussion around InfoWorld‘s content and even suggest ideas for new articles. The account seems to be active for a few days already (since July 15) and has sent its 4 followers (editors themselves, I suspect) a total of 9 updates. And even though they promise that editors will not only send headlines to followers but will add some personal observations on current events as well, right now it is headlines-only. And I really don’t think such impersonal Twitter accounts can ever be successfully used to broadcast any personal observations so my bet is it will mostly be used to transmit the news hoping for users to spot the headlines on their cells in Twitter timelines.

But my question is: when a major newspaper or magazine or another traditional news outlet finally bothers to create an account on Twitter, does it really constitute news? I definitely don’t think so – to me it now sounds similar to press releases describing that this or that media outlet offers RSS feeds for their news. It is too obvious already and it should not be such a big deal – instead I think they should be ashamed that this is not in place yet. So in place of publishing a whole story on this, I think it would have been perfectly enough for this type of publication to simply add “Follow our news on Twitter” button somewhere on the site – this would have ensured enough followers to give legs to their content anyway.