Twitter was established in 2006 and became recognized as a important component of news reporting in 2009 when the details of the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 were transmitted by a Twitter user (Murthy 2013).
"Professional journalists and non-professional para-journalists" use Twitter to report and disseminate news stories. News is always present on Twitter and can be created outside of the formal structures of the journalist's employer. These aspects of Twitter have led Hermida to establish the term ambient journalism, defined as "a telemediated practice powered by networked, always-on communications technologies and media systems of immediacy and instantaneity" (Hermida 360-61). As compared to a radio playing in the background when listeners respond to cues in the broadcast, changes in the news postings on Twitter bring stories to users' attention, particularly as details about significant events develop. Thus, news stories on Twitter can be characterized as bringing the user "right there" and "right now" (to paraphrase Hermida's concepts of immediacy and instantaneity).
Facebook account holders receive "news feeds" that include trends, politics, science and technology, sports and entertainment. Newspapers, television, radio--all have Facebook pages accessible by Facebook account holders.
The dissemination of news increasingly occurs through a process of news aggregation. An aggregator is “a program that is used to collect and display Web feeds. Such a program will continually examine the feeds from Web sites that issue such feeds and will display them in some order determined by the user of the aggregator. It is sometimes known as a news aggregator”
(Ince).
News aggregators such as Digg, Newser, and Google News provide a short summary of original, reporter-written news stories and link to the original publication website. Between 2005 and 2010, newspaper publishers battled with aggregators voicing that the practice of summarizing articles and posting on the aggregators’ websites was an infringement of copyright since readers of the articles were not paying the newspaper to read them. The aggregators counter-argued that their service resulted in millions of clicks ultimately benefiting the newspaper publisher. Some news aggregators including Reddit.com rely on users to submit content (Vanderbilt). Huffington Post is also a news aggregator formed by Jonah Peretti, Kenneth Lerer and Arianna Huffington as a left-leaning website featuring liberal commentary. Since its May 2006-formation, the Huffington Post has built its reputation on selecting stories its editors judge will be elicit measurable response from readers (Alterman).
References
Alterman, Eric. "Out of Print," The New Yorker. 31 Mar. 2008, p. 48. Literature Resource Center.
Burns, Kelli S. Social Media. Abc-Clio, 2017.
Hermida, Alfred, "Twitter as an Ambient News Network." In Weller,Katrin, Bruns, Axel, Burgess, Jean, Mahrt, Merja, & Puschmann, Cornelius (Eds.) Twitter and Society. Peter Lang, New York, 2013. Pp. 359-372.
Ince, Darrel. "aggregator." In A Dictionary of the Internet. : Oxford University Press.
Murthy, Dhiraj. Twitter. Massachusetts, Polity, 2013. p. 52.
"Preliminary First Amendment Analysis of Legislation Treating News Aggregation as Copyright Infringement." Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 12 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 947. (Summer, 2010 ), LexisNexis Academic.