Rocky Mountain News "tweets" dead boy's funeral, now (thankfully) being savaged

It's not a matter of validity. It's a completely different perspective if you are a parent.

Bottom line is Twittering this kid's funeral, whether the parents gave Temple's crew permission, was incredibly crass, demeaning and terrible for our profession.

 

Twitter: For those special times when email feels much too high brow.

Where can I download podcasts of the hymnals sung at this funeral? I need this information now.

 

Re: Rocky Mountain News "tweets" dead boy's funeral, now (thankfully) being sava

It is characters. I use Twitter to keep up with friends on a daily superficial level. We usually post Web links to what is interesting to us and go back and forth.

Other than that, I don't care what my friends had for lunch or what they are watching on TV. And I don't give a darn about what strangers are doing online.

 

Search Amazing Grace on iTunes.

 

Sounds enthralling.

 

Dear Abby:

My generation is obsessed with bullshit. Our own bullshit, specifically. I just twittered to let everyone know I was sitting around in my underwear, thinking about scratching my balls. Then I posted a poll and asked people to vote on whether or not I should scratch them. It got 234 responses. I'm starting to feel like that black hole thing in Sweeden can't get here fast enough. Any advice on how I can bring about The End of Days in a faster manner?

--FACEBOOK IS FOR LOOZERS

 

A teenage girl in India committed suicide over fears that the CERN project would cause a black hole that would destroy us all.

Problem with committing suicide in that situation is that it's more painful than letting a black hole do its work in a split second.

 

what a lovely and talented description

 

Re: Rocky Mountain News "tweets" dead boy's funeral, now (thankfully) being sava

I will take the wildly unpopular viewpoint since I, myself, am wildly unpopular.

Is there really any professional difference between this and, say, the news media staking out a prison during Ted Bundy's execution, or the media staking out Terry Schiavo's nursing home, or Edward Murrow calling the rooftop play-by-play of the bombing of London?

And we know how appalled the public was at those stories. Glass houses and all that, you know.

 

I don't use Twitter myself, but it sounds like a perfectly viable way to send people short, breaking news items. High school football scores. Election night results. Weather and/or traffic updates. Anything that people would want to know in short bursts: Who won? When's the storm coming? Where's that accident?

Twittering from a funeral smacks of "We have this technology, so we might as well try it." And doing it at a such a solemn, sacred function as a funeral - a child's funeral no less - comes off as crass. Especially since there's no breaking news people need to know coming from a funeral.

The question came up earlier as how this is different from putting the details in a story. The answer is context. In the context of a story, noting that the casket was lowered into the ground at 10:32 (or whatever it was) can be a poignant detail that adds to the emotion of the story. Standing alone as a 140-character Twitter update, it sounds emotionless and crass.

 

Good word, Mizzou. Made me LOL!

(Just a moment ago, actually, for the Twitter fans who want to know what I'm doing RIGHT NOW!)

 

Some stories, we send a reporter and a photographer. Some stories, we only send a columnist. Some stories, we cover with a big picture and a cutline only.

You don't use every damn tool in your belt for every damn job. Twittering away on a Blackberry at a funeral, for chrissakes, is like taking your cell phone (with the Ludacris ring tone) into church on Sunday morning.

Pathetic move by managers to throw everything at everything, in a desperate hope that something will stick with a possible audience. Show some decorum, morons. Show some professionalism. Show us you've been there before, in covering a sensitive story with touch and class. Don't turn every last human interaction into something for TMZ.com or, you hope, your piddly-ass hyperlocal multimedia site.

Screwed at both ends, seems to me. The youngsters want all their technology or, by God, they aren't going to pay attention to newspapers-morphing-into-Web sites. The oldsters are so dumb about technology that they learn a term or two and then try to use it at every opportunity, hoping to look, er, right NOW! and save their crumbling jobs.