While newspapers, it seems fun to find alternative news outlets.  Twitter gets lots of hype for being the newsroom of tomorrow. The most recent example is Twitter users being the first post about the LA earthquake.

But Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s not meant to be a newsroom. It helps news spread, but so do water coolers and and town criers.  But 140 characters of information doesn’t make a newsroom, but it helps the newsroom find news.

Newspapers are in trouble so looking for the next thing is a popular topic, but trying to anoint something as the “Future of…” is shortsighted. Twitter is still an experiment, one that doesn’t make money and gets crushed by its popularity. Twitter could be replaced by the next-big thing in a few months.

Twitter should, for now, be another tool in a journalists arsenal. A tweet alluding to an LA earthquake should send the journalist to their phone for confirmation.

News can be an bit of information, but a newsroom provides more. A newsroom needs to provide relevant information, context, what has happened, is happening, and will happen next. A tweet can’t provide that.  Even rapid fire wire services like AP and Reuters churn out several hundred words on events that happened minutes or hours before. Tweets might help cut that response time down.

The key difference is journalists should read Twitter. Everyone else will still read the journalists.