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The Public Editor

A Cocktail Party With Readers

EARLY adopters at The Times boldly went there four years ago. I made the move only in the last few weeks — to Twitter, that is, that curiously named domain where Middle Eastern revolutions erupt and Charlie Sheen, too.

I haven’t been tweeting long enough to judge its merits. But I note that some Times writers and editors have become prolific at it, sending out thousands of tweets to thousands and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of followers. For them, the online service, which allows you to transmit 140-character messages and links, has emerged as a vast medium of information exchange.

Is this a good thing, I wondered, or an epic waste of time? After all, if you aren’t one of Twitter’s 200 million account holders worldwide, you don’t see any of this material; it’s certainly not doing you any good.

Twitter devotees at The Times tell me the benefits are real. Twitter enables them to be better reporters, for one thing. By selecting a universe of tweeters to follow, they can track news sources of all kinds, including rival journalists. They can create listening posts across every topic they need to monitor.

David Carr, media columnist for The Times (who, as of Friday, had notched 12,062 tweets and 304,154 followers), said Twitter frequently puts him ahead of the news curve: “Twitter is my default news feed.”

Patrick LaForge, editor for news presentation (15,708 tweets, 11,859 followers), goes a step further. Other Twitter users “curate” the Web for him, he said in an e-mail message, “which means they find, analyze and comment on useful links that interest me far more quickly than I could ever do for myself. If they link to something that grabs my attention, I will generally look at it or save it for later. I don’t read everything. I dip into Twitter when I have time. The analogy is a cocktail party. You can’t join every conversation, but you drift through the crowd and stop now and then.”

Nicholas Kristof, the Op-Ed columnist (4,242 tweets, 1,036,906 followers), tweeted, blogged and wrote columns inexhaustibly from various hot spots in the Middle East after the revolutions there began. Now, he said, he is planning a possible trip to Mauritania and has used Twitter to query his million-man follower group in search of expertise on the country — with good results.

He has used it also for something that blogs and columns just aren’t appropriate for, he said: publishing a hunch.

“On Twitter in Libya, I tweeted something to the effect that I think people are a little too optimistic,” he said. “That proved to be a useful caution. I didn’t put it in my column. It didn’t fit; I didn’t have any evidence for it.”

Twitter also enables writers to super-publish their work. A piece may be destined for NYTimes.com or the newspaper, but that doesn’t stand in the way of tweeting out a link to it. When a staffer’s tweet goes forth, it reaches the full cadre of followers, some of whom may then re-tweet it. If the item is really popular, Twitter is effectively pushing a cloud of links far beyond the reach of The Times’s Web site and print edition.

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Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Down this path Times journalists go, not surprisingly, in search of a greater following. “Twitter does turn us all into marketers,” said Brian Stelter, who covers media issues (15,942 tweets, 46,859 followers).

The allure of Twitter comes into view about now, at least for me. But there is more to it than gathering, understanding and publishing. Twitter, to hear Times staffers talk about it, is an environment. Inside, Mr. Carr said, “you can see what is getting heat and what is not.”

The “Bits” technology blogger Nick Bilton (3,094 tweets, 41,025 followers) doesn’t so much use Twitter as inhabit it. “I started in early 2007, and since then I have made an effort to create a persona out of what I report,” he said. “I am always looking for articles, interesting quotes and things that center around my domain. I think people expect that of me, and that is why they follow me on Twitter.”

The Times, based on conversations I have had with editors and business-side people, believes this is all good. The interactivity of Twitter leads to stronger relationships with readers and more visits to NYTimes.com, although it should be noted that social media like Twitter and Facebook still are only modest contributors to Times Web traffic.

There are risks, though. An obvious one is that tweets are free to go forth unedited, in the same way that Times staffers are unedited when they appear on television or radio. Times policy simply cautions them to follow the basic rules of common journalistic sense.

So far, the laissez-faire approach has generated staff enthusiasm for Twitter, and nothing terrible has happened. Perhaps the most remembered misstep came a year ago when a reporter covering Toyota, in a fit of frustration with the company’s handling of a press conference, tweeted, “Toyota sucks.”

It’s not clear, either, whether Twitter’s marketing power is as good for The Times as it is for individual staffers, who can tweet their way to building powerful individual brands. Joshua Benton, who directs the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, noted that many of the top Twitter accounts at The Times are individuals’ accounts and thus would travel with those individuals if they should leave the paper. Where does that leave The Times?

A final risk is perhaps more abstract. Twitter, it seems apparent, enables journalists to report and publish actively in digital space. It allows them to create their own community. But this can become a self-limiting hive or, as Brian Stelter noted, “an echo chamber.”

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, artist and author of “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” in which he explores hive behavior on the Internet. When people share information across social networks like Twitter, he said in an interview, they withhold the best stuff.

“Secrecy hasn’t gone away, but it has become more secret,” he said.

He added, “If reporters only work in this realm of the shared, they are missing some real dynamics.”

I wouldn’t worry too much that Times writers and editors will confine themselves solely to the shared content found on Twitter. But there is a danger that the network is somehow self-limiting — a kind of hall of mirrors — just as there are more prosaic dangers like tweeting a giant unedited gaffe or overindulging in personal brand building.

The benefits of Twitter appear to be many, I conclude, especially for journalists who place The Times first and don’t confuse sharing with reporting.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/thepubliceditor. The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section WK, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Cocktail Party With Readers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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