You can do a lot in a 140-character Twitter entry, writes John Dickerson at Nieman Reports. And no, the online squib will not spell the end of long form reporting. Dickerson's right that Twitter affords weary political correspondents like himself the ability to share fun anecdotes from the field that would otherwise get cut from proper pieces. Example: "Weare, NH: Audience man to McCain: 'I heard that Hershey is moving plants to Mexico and I'll be damned if I'm going to eat Mexican chocolate.'" But old hack nostalgics have a legitimate point about how this new mode of digital diary-keeping can take its toll. It's the style, not the substance, of journalism that's at issue.

Dickerson:

The risk for journalism, of course, is that people spend all day Twittering and reading other people's Twitter entries and don't engage with the news in any other way. This seems a pretty small worry. If written the right way, Twitter entries build a community of readers who find their way to longer articles because they are lured by these moment-by-moment observations. As a reader, I've found that I'm exposed to a wider variety of news because I read articles suggested to me by the wide variety of people I follow on Twitter. I'm also exposed to some keen political observers and sharp writers who have never practiced journalism.

I thought everyone got their news from blogs, or is that a distinction without a difference now? The kinds of hilarious off-the-record set pieces Dickerson alludes to were once the stuff of shoptalk. There's something appealing about the secret-handshake quality of how a story gets written that is lost in the digital age of premature confession and on-demand tell-all. Who would want to read Gay Talese's memoirs, or any of Ron Rosenbaum's reminiscences about the old Esquire gang, if every professional writer began dishing his juiciest tidbits every five minutes?

[Nieman Reports]