May Day!! Hermetic and Arrogant Grey Lady breaks the news as if she's breaking wind

Felix Salmon of Reuters assesses how the NY Times claims to have "broken" the Bin Laden raid. Click here for the complete post.
An excerpt:
has dinosaurs like Bill Keller and Arthur Brisbane, whose respective columns this weekend betray the fact that the people with the bully pulpits are stuck in a completely different world, seemingly ignorant of some of the biggest stories in social media.

[Arthur] Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist:

Er - an even worse typo! Fox's Freudian slip

An anchor at the Fox station in Washington, WTTG, said – first thing out of his mouth as the President walked away from the podium:

“President Obama speaking from the East Room of the White House, telling the nation and the world: President Obama is in fact dead. It was a U.S.-led strategic (horrified co-anchor mumbles correction) I’m sorry. Osama Bin Laden is dead.” Read more on world wide coverage of the raid, as it happened in Abbotabad, on ReaderSupportedNews

And lets give a cybersalute to tweeter Sohair Attar, the world's virtual witness in Abbottabad, self described as an "IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops".

It was somehow fitting that President Obama's announcement about the death of bin Laden interrupted Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice" reality show on Sunday night.

Jay Rosen retreats from retweets

Reporter Jay Rosen writes about his twitter goof here, in a confessional post called "Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own". This should be a warning to new media practitioners everywhere. Bottom line - Check sources and think before you post anything- even a tweet! And for accuracy, it's best not to multitask. Jobs are on the line.

Tweeting the News? Beware of retweeting errors at warp speed

The perils of tweeting the news from one reporter's perspective. Click here for a thoughtful confession session from Colum Lynch, a Foreign Policy blogger responsible for Turtle Bay and its tweets.

Twitter is a rumor mill, a high-tech, and often partisan, upgrade on the old office water cooler -- except this version lets your boss, your friends, your critics, and everyone else listen in. But like office gossip and rumors, a lot of it is often dead wrong...
The denizens of Twitter, I've discovered, aren't always acting in bad faith. But the medium has a way of allowing old-fashioned mistakes from obscure publications or even traditional news organizations to spread like wildfire. The retweet is an especially ambivalent Twitter function for those who use the service to gather news. Retweeting allows you to forward an interesting tweet or link to your own community of followers while leaving the original Tweeter to vouch for its credibility. The lax norms around retweets can let an incorrect story initially sent out to a handful of people gain exposure to a wider audience of tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions.

CNN Editor Fired Over Tweet Praising Hezbollah Mentor

It took less than 140 characters for Octavia Nasr to end her 20-year career with CNN. And those characters weren't anything along the lines of "I quit." Slate reports that,

the senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs tweeted about how she respected Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on Sunday. Fadlallah supported suicide bombings against Israel and was a critic of both Israel and the United States. Nasr apologized for the tweet and even wrote a blog post on Tuesday night about the issue. In it, she wrote that when she tweeted about respecting the cleric, she was referring to his attitude toward women's rights: Fadlallah gave women the right to hit their husbands if they were attacked first. "Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet," Nasr wrote on her blog. "It's something I deeply regret." By Wednesday she was unemployed. In a leaked internal memo, Parida Khosravi, the senior vice president for CNN International Newsgathering, wrote, "At this point, we believe that [Nasr's] credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward," according to New York magazine's Daily Intel blog.

Read original story in New York

Canuck tweets while Bangkok burns

/> The photo above courtesy of Kees


Is this a good idea? Tweeting while Bangkok burns... Mark MacKinnon, an earnest Canadian journalist from the Globe & Mail, breezed in from Beijing and might have been more alert to the nuances of the situation in Thailand if he weren't thumbing his blackberry every few minutes. The chaos unfolded right outside the Foreign Press Association (at Chidlom station on the fabled skytrain) and more and more, one of Asia's great capitals looks ripe for revolution, especially if the revered King expires. Still, in retrospect it's instructive to see the chaos unfold in real time, and the rumors affirmed or supplanted. MacKinnon even photo-tweets during an ambulance ride!
(hat tip to Kees for final photo; middle one tweeted by Mark MacKinnon.