Slashdot Mirror
The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink
teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting:
"A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."
I wonder if this will make the guardian more interesting to read..
My favorite Tweeter, Lance Armstrong
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
tsop ts1
Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.
I couldn't find anything when googling for "waffle and bluster" aside from this story so I looked up each of the words.
waffle
Speech or writing that is vague, pretentious or evasive. Example: "This interesting point seems to get lost a little within a lot of self-important waffle."
bluster
Pompous, officious talk.
I guess we think more highly of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. in the states.
My work here is dung.
The line of people who want to post in this thread just to get an "achievement" can start here...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
There is no good reason for tons and tons of information in news articles. This boils everything down to the essentials and puts it into a format that everyone can understand. Good for you The Guardian! /joke
This post seems legit ;-)
How much wood would a woodchopper chop if a woodchopper would chop wood?
Since I have the attention span of woah, Britney Spears just ate an entire bowl of rusty nails on live TV.
What was I saying? Oh, right. As I was saying, if cars continue to run on haha, nice bewbs! then we'll definitely need to see improvement in the White House.
Sent from your iPad.
It's about time these lazy journalists got with the times.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Twitter: Micro Blogging Service
Tweet: To send a message on twitter.
Twat: Any journalist that reports on/about twitter.
And are they going to post the news in the Lolcat language ??
let's just hope this doesn't mean google will start aggregating tweets
i read about it in a blog once
and it solves GMG's dispute with Google News
People will actually pay attention to the news.
the good news is tinyurl.com/b5x6e is real. the bad news is it goes to the wikipedia article on WWII--come on guys, how hard would it be to slip a rickroll in there?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
anyone that thinks this isn't an april foolds day prank
I would definitely subscribe. For the articles of course.
If you will it Guardian, it is no dream.
...but no cigar. I might have bought it if the story had been about The Sun, or The Dail Wail, though.
You'd think that after the story yesterday, they would come up with something a little less obvious. The whole premise of the fools joke is to get people to believe it, at least temporarily. How can a paper, who only 24 hours before complained about the lack of funding on the internet, possibly goto an internet only distribution system? I might be getting old, but in my eyes, no april fools joke will ever match up to the seminal BBC prank. Now to stop those damn kids skateboarding on the sidewalk...
... whatever happened to believable April Fools stories? It was a lot more fun when you could really get fooled instead of just being able to discount a story within the first line. (Kids, get off my lawn, too!)
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:49-50).
I think we're in hell.
*weeps*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I have to give kudos to the Guardian... it's going to be hard to top this one.
new headline:
OH HAI! I UPGRADED UR GARDIEN KTHXBYE
(that's right... mod me down... care--)
Even birds are twittering.
Is anyone else tired of these stupid jokes?
Kia released one yesterday with a half assed photoshop of a new Soul with "wind catchers" for the Soul "Wind powered hybrid".
I got the fail whale while trying to RTFA..or should that be RTFT? @the_guardian: This is so OMGWTFBBQPONIES! crap. fail whale again!
But nice try anyway.
-- John
The Guardian is about to twat!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Give me waffles and maple syrup any day of the week (side of bacon, please), bluster just doesn't have that same yummy taste.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The guardian reporters have been out in force today twittering about the G20 riots - they probably outnumbered the protesters. The technology section twitters here: http://www.twitter.com/guardiantech or it does when the fail whale isn't showing.
Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.
Good luck with that.
1849: "OMG gold @ cali. we're leaving in 10." Oct 8, 1871: "Flamers in chicago http://bit.ly/SaAdB" Dec 7, 1941: "omg.. azn invasion!" Sept 11, 2001: "2planes1catastrophe" March 31, 2009: "any suggestions for hilarious april fools pranks? DM us!"
Rants by George Monbiot over Guardian Twitter then! : )
Instead of posting every single April Fool's prank separately
It may be a lame april fools joke, but in the long term I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like this starts to happen. There are already a lot of news organizations that put out updates via Twitter. 140 characters a little hard to fit an entire news story in, but people are giving less and less attention to the news these days anyway.
It would be quite a big step for a newspaper like the guardian that prides it's self on contect to reduce all it's stories down to something that would be worthy of the sun.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But this made me think back to the Times' "headlines" that Winston had to create in short Newspeak blurbs in 1984.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Now if you'll excuse me...
OMGPONIES
-=Bang Bang=-
Just trying to get the stupid achievement if its real.
My Babylon
I heard the whole company was moving to post only on 4chan and every story would have some releveance to a power rating or other.
...nothing of value was lost.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Mountain Xpress, an Asheville NC based paper, has also announced a shift to twitter based reporting. Check it out and read their "Twitter manifesto" at www.mountainx.com
A teacher of mine once said the substance of a news story should be clear by the end of the first paragraph. The april fools' joke aside, this could be a useful way to get reporters back on track with story reporting.
I see a new mode of distribution for newspapers.
Just break up all the articles in the 140 character tweets. Then all readers with a TweetTorrent client would be able to gather them together (and share them of course) and read the entire newspaper.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
is double plus good.
Or rather:
Brevity: ++ OK.
Guardian journalists simply are incapable of condensing their pompous bloviations down to 140 characters.
Really wish I had mod points for you; that was the hardest I've laughed all week. On a day when too many people are trying too hard to be funny, you hit the spot. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Nowhere near as good as this one - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Serriffe
Travel agents were besieged after the article appeared.
Give up on these lame frigging April Fools posts. Not one of them has been funny or even mildly entertaining. If you want humor, post some actual news stories and let the /. denizens have at it.
The comments are ALWAYS funnier than this crap.
It shouldn't make a difference for the most of us anyway, who claim we "only read the articles."
ASCII art porn, indeed.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Tags break April Fools gags :o(
no comment
A guy in my office fell for this this morning.
I think this would be a better format for Fox News. I mean really, 140 characters is more than enough for them. "Liberals!" "Socialism!" "Baby killers!" "Obama's recession!" "Tax and Spend!" "Destruction of marriage!" "Easy on terrorists!"
Heck, I think that pretty much sums up all of Fox News right now. I guess they can just shut down and open up the air ways for some real journalism. How about a 24/7 Daily Show channel?
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I'm trapped in an alternate universe where this is real.
Oh wait, I picked up The Sun.
Slashdot needs to implement a 140 character limit on comments. It's very annoying to read these comments that drone on after a nice informat
I looked at the headline, thought well that sucks. Then I wondered where the years of dragging it out, crying for help, and withering away in painful destructive lawsuits against the internet, google, and yahoo for undermining their business model went.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
This isn't News. This is Olds. Twitter's popularity is spiking. This was only inevitable.
(Also, searching for April Fool's story. >_>)
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
140 characters shouldn't be too much of a problem to get the nuances of an important news item across.
If they need more they can always use tweetdoubler.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Just transform the quote into 3l33t speak... "Iz pwnzor ppl dat hatez. n00bs a11 same." or something similar. (I'm just found out I'm very bad at haxzor txt)
We need a site that caters to the ultra short messages of light.
2009/4/1 12:00 pm: Dude ;-)
2009/4/1 11:23 am: Dude
2009/4/1 11:04 am: D-Ude
See, now isn't that a whole lot of self indulgent crap we don't have to ignore?
TLDR
wouldn't that make us all underachievers?
Now how am I going to get the butler to press it nicely before I read it?
I'm not surprised there is an April Fools topic related to Twitter. I think people like twitter because the small text limit gives you an excuse for writing like a spacker.
It happened to the Seattle P-I for real this year - over 100 years of ink, forced to stop the presses and go to web only.
They're trying to steal readers by catering to the attention span of The Sun's traditional audience, obviously.