South African blogger Herman Manson has posted an article on Memeburn ('the South African Mashable'), questioning whether that by breaking news, Twitter will also break journalism.
There are plenty of examples of tweets being reported as fact without them being checked. For example, the (UK) Daily Mail reported that the iPhone4 was being recalled after a Steve Jobs Twitter account - a fake one - sent out a message about it.
Similarly in South Africa, Manson looks at what happened in South Africa after ex police commissioner Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption.
If you scanned Twitter immediately after the trial you would have thought that Selebi was guilty of both corruption and obstructing justice. But actually Selebi was only guilty of the 1st charge. The problem was that in the haste to get the 1st tweet out, a journalist got it wrong and with the tweets and retweets, this then became the story.
Manson points to an econsultancy piece by Jake Hird where he published an infographic showing how news breaks and spreads post Twitter. As Jake's graphic shows, Twitter very often precedes news outlets in spreading news, which means a lot of editors end up playing catch-up.
Urging journalists to add social media and Twitter into their codes of conduct, Manson says: "With Twitter able to deliver news quickly and to a potentially huge audience due to its viral nature, already-pressured newsrooms are under increasing pressure to get content out, and to get it out fast."
And when they get it wrong based on a series of tweets, the damage is done - in the Jackie Selebi case, a correction was tweeted out, but by then, the original Twitter version had become gospel.