Before yesterday's Battle of Spartanburg—aka "another goddamn Republican presidential debate"—Michele Bachmann's campaign intercepted a terrible email from a CBS staffer stating that Bachmann wouldn't be asked as many questions as the other clownidates because she's polling at four percent and will lose. Vulgarity ensued.
Are you sick of your friends who can't stop talking about the inauguration? Then you're really going to hate Twitter today. A special edition of the Twitterati to catch up with this morning's chattiness:
The media live deeply ordinary lives. Okay, deeply ordinary lives in which their bosses buy them caviar. The Twitterati report in with a feast for the senses:
We gratuitously mocked Times columnist Nick Kristof's Twitter feed last week. But the truth is that he's in good company. Lots of big-shot media people—including many Gawker "favorites"!—have Twitters, despite the fact that Twitter is proven to destroy journalism. We haven't been paying enough attention to their various tweets about this and that. After the jump, we condense the offering of five famous media twits into bite-sized packages:
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.
