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Janet Street-Porter Calls Stephen Fry Twat. Film at 11.

Janet Street-Porter Calls Stephen Fry Twat. Film at 11.

Janet Street-PorterJanet Street-Parker, Editor-at-Large for The Independent, has hit out at the popular microblogging platform Twitter calling every person using the 140-character platform Twat in the same breath. Street-Porter who hit the headlines earlier this year with her controversial statements about Ian Tomlinson’s death seemed on a mission, using the flawed ‘Teenagers don’t use Twitter’ survey, and included both Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah in her vendetta, trying to remind everyone of the mindlessness of the platform.

…all twittering really delivers is the ultimate in mini-munchie banality. Instead of real emotion, in-depth opinion, considered arguments about why the NHS works, or the many reasons for not eating veal, what we get is breathless trivia. It certainly says bugger-all about what really happens at home with the Browns – which is why, presumably, Sarah, a former PR, loves it.

Twitter works for the middle class, the middle-aged and for work-weary wannabe trendies because it lets them feel they’re part of a big happening club, when in fact all they are doing is exchanging mindlessness.

Known for her ‘high class’ style, regular reality show participant and former ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Here’ contestant, Street-Porter claimed that Twitter was useless both as an influential news platform and as informative platform to help base decisions on.

If I want to know whether a show is worth going to at the Edinburgh Festival, or if Bonnie Prince Billy’s latest album is worth buying, I certainly don’t want a 140-character Twitter; I want an intelligent review written in real sentences, not some bastard lingo that’s the ugly love-child of texting and abbreviations.

If she would have worked for a modern minded media organization she could have included the recent Twitter is 40% Babble whitepaper, fully ignoring the 9% useful links and information stated in the study. JSP totally missed the point and ignored the fact that Twitter, together with other social networks, a news-breaking platform is, useful even to old, retired and deprecated journalists traditional media. Or as Paul Carr said:

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While bloggers can own the first five minutes of any breaking story – a plane crash, a fire, a burglary – it’s always going to be the professional reporters who own the next five days, or five weeks. They walk the streets, work their contacts and – yes – trawl the blogosphere for eye-witness reports, and then take all of that information, analyse it, follow it up and ultimately provide an account of events that readers can trust.

What JSP has shown us with her most recent entry is that she clearly does understand social media and the art of linkbaiting.

Photo Credit: Jem Stone.

View Comment (1)
  • Thats what they kept saying about social media at first. But information doesn’t have to come from just ‘the elite’. Everybody’s a part of whats happening nowadays. She’s missing the point.

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