This headline from PC Magazine is particularly questionable:

Twitter is the New CNN, By Lance Ulanoff

A new study paints the popular micro-blogging service Twitter in a whole new light and sets it up to take on traditional news media. …

And now, my Twitter hypothesis has some academic support. A group of Korean researchers recently completed and presented the results of a unique quantitative study that paints Twitter, in fairly stark terms, as the likely future of news.

Though the research makes for a catchy headline, it actually seeks to find out something far more benign: Slide 13 asks if “Twitter has any characteristics of news media.”

The figures mostly sort out who's following whom and how content makes its way through the platform. Any competitive pressures that the platform might exert on other media aren't expressed in the presentation with actual words, so either I'm failing to read between the lines or Ulanoff is seeing something that isn't really there. (Admittedly, the former scenario wouldn't be a complete shock.)

To the question: Of course Twitter's digital publication and wide user base does make it count as a form of news media -- a pretty ineffective one, considering every contemporary news value besides being timely. It's not about to replace CNN or any other mainstream outlet of even marginal significance.

So I left this in the post's Comments section:

Twitter is great for headlines but terrible for context. Does 140 characters of summary, devoid of much detail at all, constitute an act of news reporting? Twitter posts don't conform to the traditional criteria for sound news values. And, unlike media platforms, those additional criteria are not changing rapidly.

The platform is only marginally useful as a microblogging tool. While it's easy to develop widgets to publish Twitter content elsewhere online, the platform is not itself html-compliant. So links, without the ability to display them by writing in hypertext, consume a good chunk of the 140-character limit.

Twitter is useful for gathering news. But not for reporting it.

Coincidentally, shortly after the article was posted, Twitter's media blog released a crude version of something I hope it refines and rolls out as an official application: an embed function meant to use Twitter posts to quote sources in online news stories and blogs. An organized way to gather information from Twitter and use it in reporting, with users becoming the sources, not the journalists.

Like this:

Twitter does have a significant role in the future of media: As a place for sources, not for acts of journalism.