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June 23rd, 2009 by Wadds

Future of journalism debate: editors required

The debate over the future of media continues but one thing is for sure, it’s too soon to rip-up the editorial model.

The sheer volume of conversation taking place around the Iranian election result are cluttering up channels and making it impossible to hear voices that are coming directly from the country. On social networks from Flickr to Twitter messages of sympathy and support are generating huge volumes of noise.

Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick reckons that it’s a new type of spam:

[…] a new type of spam is born, “whuffiespam” where the aim is to jump on to a good cause and get social capital by being visibly (and risibly) more caring than thou.

An editorial function would separate the signal from the noise and rate the integrity of the source. It would also stop the nonsense seen yesterday from HabitatUK which has hijacked popular Twitter tags with promotional spam.

Alan reckons that this is the Future of Twitterspam. Better get used to it – or overlay an editorial model.