Posted on January 22, 2010 by by valerirojas

MSN is reporting that Five journalists are planning to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news they can get from the popular social network and micro-blogging sites.

The five journalists will only have access to mobiles that don’t have internet connection and are ban from television, radio and newspapers. Their only source of communication will be Facebook and Twitter.

You can only hope they have lots of friends in facebook to tell them stories of what’s going on in the world or they will have to find public facebook groups to gather information from or they will just have to report stories about their family and friends “great news”.

When it comes to Twitter, well good luck to them putting stories together from 140 character posts. They could always get lots of people to tweet them stories as a group which could work but it can be a slow process. I am not sure how well Twitter will go in this experiment as most tweets are links to stories, photos and videos from other websites which they can’t access. So how will they report on a story when they don’t have enough information?

Maybe next time they could use citizen journalism websites to gather news from the online communities or even better “try to use Google Wave“.

Either way this will be an interesting experiment and I can’t wait to see what happens.

So is this stupid and a waste of time and money? what are your thoughts?

Big Brother goes Social Media - Five Journalists in a house with Twitter and Facebook, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating

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