Catching up with your blogs

I’ve spent the evening reading what you have to say about Twitter as a journalism tool and Adam Gaffin, the founder and editor of Universal Hub. Not to oversimplify, but I’d say most of you gave thumbs down to Twitter, but a big thumbs up to Universal Hub.

Twitter has its good points, but it’s hard to get excited about it when people use it for constant updates on what they’re doing during the day, or when news organizations do nothing more than replicate their RSS feeds. Using Twitter to break news following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai is an interesting idea, but the results don’t quite match the hype.

I’ve been using Twitter since last summer, and I agree with a comment Steve Garfield posted on Jess Volpe’s blog: Stick with it for a bit, and it won’t seem as useless as it might first appear. It’s hard to explain, and I realize I risk sounding like Mark Twain’s sardonic description of Wagner’s operas: it’s “better than it sounds.”

By contrast, there was no such negativity over Universal Hub, which is the sort of professional/amateur collaboration we’ve been talking about quite a bit this semester. Adam Gaffin is a professional journalist; before he became a tech editor, he was a reporter for what’s now the MetroWest Daily News, in Framingham.

All of you seem quite enthusiastic about Universal Hub.

In bringing a journalist’s sensibility to the cacophony of  voices spread across nearly 1,000 Greater Boston blogs, Gaffin has showed that citizen journalism can be timely, funny and heartbreaking, shining a light into small corners that most news organizations can’t be bothered with.

And though Gaffin has not developed Universal Hub into a full-fledged business, he has demonstrated that an ambitious, entrepreneurial young journalist might be able to find a way to blog for a living. That’s good news at a time when large news organizations are downsizing.