At the end of last week I attended a breakfast briefing with Sky News, courtesy of the very helpful people over at Gorkana. The session aimed to give a better insight into the demands of the online news room and in particular the much hyped appointment of Ruth Barnett – Sky’s very own Twitter correspondent. Unfortunately (but perhaps a justification for her role), Ruth was unable to attend in person having been called away to speak in the news about the events in Iran and instead took part remotely. The situation in Iran comes as the latest in a long line of events that have propelled Twitter into the media mainstream. Its instantaneous nature fits perfectly with a contemporary model of news delivery, as it provides an instant frontline account of events – Sky even introduced an iPhone app to facilitate this. Ruth covered this and explained how her role largely involved monitoring trends and topics through Twitter before often returning to good old fashioned research. It’s clear that Twitter has a huge news value but Ruth sticks with the general consensus that it isn’t enough to take over as an all encompassing news source. She instead believes that an overall approach of “adding content to enhance” news would remain, but not necessarily via Twitter and its associated lingo alone. In time, alternatives to Twitter will emerge and provide new sources for immediate content.

Looking at the future of news, Jon Gripton, Chief News Editor for Sky News online who was also in attendance, briefly addressed the topic of charging for online news content. Rupert Murdoch has expressed some interest in the pay model and with very few news sources making money, Gripton agreed that it was a model which had to be considered by all. However, the presence of the BBC means this is always going to be a difficult route to navigate and he feels that there is currently no model or argument which is convincing enough to move forward with.