Fire at Boston Medical Center
By adamg - Wed, 04/22/2009 - 6:53pm.
Boston Police tweeted about a fire at 70 E. Newton St., around 6:30 p.m.
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Be wary of cops bearing tweets
I've said this before but now that you are covering them tweet by tweet, it's going to matter:
Twitter feels immediate. Neatly-printed messages seem "final" and "official"
Keep in mind that BPD will be using Twitter to steer all "news media" to the stories they want covered, in the way they want them covered (and thus, away from other stories because now more than ever, news media resources are finite and not sufficient to even catch all that should be caught).
Don't fall for it.
BPDNews perhaps ...
Because, yes, it is a very selective site in terms of what gets posted (all murders, yes, all shootings and stabbings and holdups, hardly).
The Twitter feed seems more an attempt to provide traffic information. That the police are also saying why traffic should stay away from location X is a bonus for news freaks like me.
But you are right, it's very much first-draft material and should hardly be regarded as the final word on anything (for example, the initial tweet about Brisman said she'd been stabbed, because that's what hotel security reported to police).