What I can see, though, is that niche audience of tragics growing as the political process — or at least the insiders’ commentary on the political process — becomes more accessible.

I imagine it’d be similar to the day trader phenomenon on the stock market. Previously, unless you had the time to physically front up at the bourses and get the latest gossip, you’d have to rely on your stockbroker. Now, anyone can fire up a web browser, a stock trading service and live chat.

In both cases, the dynamic is going to change significantly. Somehow.

no encapsulated agenda.

Really. No agenda in tweets direct from the party room?

Are you new in town?

If this kind of Twitter event goes even remotely mainstream, there won’t be a two way conversation and the dross will far outway the good, making the whole thing unworkable.

Watch any other event like the death of Michael Jackson for your proof of that.

If this kind of Twitter event goes even remotely mainstream, there won’t be a two way conversation and the dross will far outway the good, making the whole thing unworkable.

Agreed. And yes it is a niche market.

Certainly for a few hundred of the daggiest voyeurs of political porn in the country (which I’d proudly name myself one of), the Twitter feed was the best thing since the Internet. But lets not get to excited that some journos responded to someones tweet. Its all very well to have a two way conversation, but the fact that this was possible demonstrates that the audience, however excited they were, was pretty small. You couldn’t have a two way conversation with any decently sized audience.

For all the excitement, what did we gain by the second to second flow of information? If you even just waited till Lateline came on, you got all the same information as Twitter drip fed over many hours, but in a coherent form, and you even got to see Annabell.

So yes, Twitter is here to stay and will be a valuable addition to the array of media sources, but I suspect its a very small number of us political nerds who notice or care. The rest of the country will probably hear about the Twittersplosion that occurred in a cringe-worthy SMH or Oz article, but that’s about it. If this kind of Twitter event goes even remotely mainstream, there won’t be a two way conversation and the dross will far outway the good, making the whole thing unworkable.

No, I don’t. I quoted that person’s thought as an indicator of the sort of value he (and others) felt they were getting from following those journos’ Twitter feeds.

Oh hell you don’t want to listen to what that guy had to say (or tweet)!!

To be honest I made it more of a comment of where I see potential $ value in the media. The tweets the press gallery were providing were unique and required them actually being there. For me, it felt like I was getting a service for free, as opposed to 95% of what is in online MSM sites, which is repetitive, filtered and regurgitated press releases, and worth bugger all.

I could see Murdoch looking at, once the org goes behind the paywall, including in the subscription access to the plethora of tweet accounts of the news.ltd journos (I’d say all they would need is to make their accounts restricted, and opened to you to follow only once subscription has occured - or something, I am sure some boffins could work it out).

The good thing about such a service is it would put an onus on the journos to tweet. The negative though would be to lose the “informal” nature of their tweets at the moment - eg what they tweet during QANDA and QT, or even just about what they’re doing that night for dinner (and the sense that you can have nice friendly banter with them). It wold not work if suddnely there was an onus on them to respond to everyone or none… some balance surely though could be found.

So I am not really wanting them to go behind a paywall, but just that I could see the possibility of it happening, and were it to I feel you would actually be getting something for the money that you couldn’t get elsewhere (eg many free blogs give much better analysis of events than do the MSM).

It is far too easy for supposedly well-informed people to ignore the actual news and analysis if they “already know everything” from 500 people’s ill-considered 140-character brainfarts.

Strong voices are needed to help make sense of the rabble. 90% of everything is crap.