How Twitter poses a threat to newspapers

[Commentary] Thanks to the Internet, most every journalist can reach independently an audience immeasurably greater than the star reporter on the biggest newspaper or top-rated newscast could a generation ago. Now the traditional news business is built, one way or another, on a promise of exclusivity: What we've got you won't get elsewhere. So the idea that a media company's biggest threat may come from its own newsroom is hard for news managers to swallow. To make them really gag, add Twitter. Twitter is a dazzling social networking technology that allows you to stay in touch, via brief updates known as tweets, with a vast number of friends, acquaintances and interested strangers as you go through your day. Related software enables you to interact with even broader arrays of people you seek out through particular words in their tweets that suggest they know something you're interested in. It's easy to see why journalists, who depend on just such networks of informants, find Twitter appealing. The danger is that Twitter will keep reporters off the streets and in front of their screens, that it will further skew journalism toward seeking out, listening to and serving the young, the hip, the technically sophisticated, the well-off - in short, the better-connected. The people who aren't being heard now aren't sending out tweets.