The Twitter explosion: whether they are reporting about it, finding sources on it or urging viewers, listeners and readers to fo

It's OK to be sick and tired of Twitter. Heaven knows, it may be the world's most overhyped technology, the latest in an ever-lengthening list of overhyped technologies and cultural techno-fads stretching back to CB radio. LexisNexis counts more than 3,000 news stories mentioning the microblogging service in a five-day period in mid-April alone. A Google search churns up 400 million mentions. Naturally, a Twitter backlash is in full swing; no less than the likes of Maureen Dowd, Garry Trudeau and "The Daily Show" have made fun of this latest media obsession.

The withering overexposure no doubt reflects journalists' status as members of the Twittering class. Some well-known news-media names now have Twitter followings that are almost as large as the circulation of their newspapers or viewership of their TV shows. "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos had more than 564,000 people following his 140-character tweets as of mid-May. Stephanopoulos, tweeting on April 22: "Just finished breakfast (flatbread w sour cherries) in Tehrna. Saw President Ahmedinejad yesterday. Trying to see Roxana Saberi today." Other mass-media Twitteurs include "Meet the Press" host David Gregory (528,356 followers), MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (506,951), National Public Radio host Scott Simon (360,861), and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue (306,371).

For journalists, the real question is whether Twitter is more than just the latest info-plaything. Does it "work" in any meaningful way--as a news-dissemination channel, a reporting and source-building tool, a promotional platform? Or is it merely, to buy the caricature, just a banal, narcississtic and often addictive time suck?

The unsatisfying answer: It all depends.

For anyone still in the dark about Twitter, a quick bit of background: Twitter, created by a San Francisco startup called Obvious and publicly released in August 2006, is a free social networking service that enables anyone to post pithy messages, known as tweets, to groups of self-designated followers. The tweets can be sent from and received by any kind of device--desktop, laptop, BlackBerry, cellphone. It's like instant messaging or text messaging, but one-to-many, instead of one-to-one. Twitter has grown with astounding speed, attracting 17 million visitors in April, an 83 percent gain over the previous month, according to the research firm comScore.

News organizations and reporters have been quick to adopt Twitter for an obvious reason: Its speed and brevity make it ideal for pushing out scoops and breaking news to Twitter-savvy readers. The Oregonian in Portland may have been the mainstream media pioneer in this regard; it began posting its own links and aggregating citizen tweets about flooding and road closures during heavy storms in central Oregon in late 2007, when Twitter barely had 500,000 users nation wide. Other newspapers have subsequently used Twitter to post swift-changing updates following natural disasters in their areas.

Reporters now routinely tweet from all kinds of events--speeches, meetings and conferences, sports events. In February, a federal judge gave his blessing to Ron Sylvester of the Wichita Eagle to use Twitter to report on a trial of six suspected gang members, the first time tweeting had been permitted inside a federal courtroom. Sylvester tweeted frequently from the trial, providing a nearly contemporaneous account. On the other hand, not all tweets are equally useful. Tweets from reporters covering the heavily choreographed political conventions last summer produced plenty of snark and trivia, but little in the way of important or interesting news.

Twitter "works best in situations where the story is changing so fast that the mainstream media can't assemble all the facts at once," says Craig Stoltz, a "semi-evangelical" Twitter user and new-media consultant who writes a lively tech blog called Web2. 0h ... Really? (2ohreally.com). "The plane crash, the riot, the political event--these are the kinds of stories where time is important and the facts are scattered."

In fact, Twitter can be a serious aid in reporting. It can be a living, breathing tip sheet for facts, new sources and story ideas. It can provide instantaneous access to hard-to-reach newsmakers, given that there's no PR person standing between a reporter and a tweet to a government official or corporate executive. It can also be a blunt instrument for crowdsourcing. When a vacant building collapsed in late April, New York Times reporters put out the Twitter equivalent of an APB: "Seeking any eyewitnesses to Lower Manhattan building collapse." Imagine the torrent of data that would have been available to the Times had Twitter been around on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Twitter's optimal use requires a little care and feeding. By seeding and pruning her "following" and "followers" lists on Twitter, blogger Nancy Shute of USNews.com has assembled her own interactive community of thought leaders, expert sources, fellow journalists and just plain folks interested in her specialties, science and medicine. Her running conversation with this network occasionally leads to story tips, she says. In the early days of the discovery of salmonella-infected peanut butter, for instance, a federal employee she follows on Twitter tweeted the news that government health officials would soon be using Twitter to highlight new information about the outbreak, a first for the Feds. Shute checked it out. Her scoop was on her blog a few hours later.

Monica Guzman, a blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, doesn't just trade tips, quips and gossip with her Twitter circle; she actually meets with her Twitter "community" at a local coffeehouse on a regular basis, cultivating a deeper relationship with like-minded sources.

Veteran new-media blogger and Arizona State University journalism professor Dan Gillmor says journalists should view Twitter as a "collective intelligence system" that provides early warnings about trends, people and news. Journalists, he says, should "follow people who point them to things they should know about" and direct questions back to them to do better reporting. He recommends setting up keyword searches and understanding "hashtags," Twitter-speak for a group of tweets about the same subject or event, indicated by a # sign and topic word (such as "swineflu").

If he were running a news organization, Paul Grabowicz, director of the new-media program at the University of California, Berkeley's journalism school, says Twitter would be as much a part of his newsroom's daily reporting arsenal as phones and notepads. "I would be asking everyone on my staff, 'Who are the people and target groups you're trying to reach? Can you start a Twitter group to follow those people?' " Twitter, he says, enables reporters "to reach people where they are. People are busy, but they're out there consuming and exchanging information on these networks. This is a way of bridging the gap with them and being more engaged with them. News reporters need to be on the ground floor of this, instead of when the horse has left the barn."

Twitter can also be a kind of community organiz ing tool for the newsroom itself. When big stories have broken, a few news organizations have channeled the freewheeling exchanges and debates that explode all over Twitter by creating their own hashtags. A day before the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages in the state, the Des Moines Register created its own hashtag, #iagaymarriage. The tag quickly caught on, becoming so popular that competitors like the Gazette in Cedar Rapids wound up tagging their tweets with it. The Register posted excerpts of some of the resulting discussion, turning it into the 21st century equivalent of the classic man-on-the-street opinion feature. The Herald in Everett, Washington, did something similar earlier this year when its region was flooded; the paper's #waflood hashtag became the go-to code for bulletins affecting the community and a rich source of news and reactions for the Herald.

Hashtags are just one of the tools that bring coherence to what can seem like Twitter's tower of Babel. Sites such as Tweetcloud.com and Twitscoop.com, which track the hottest topics on Twitter, are like police scanners for social media networks. They offer a real-time glimpse into what people, or people on Twitter anyway, are buzzing about (admittedly, most of the buzz is fairly predictable, such as chatter about the day's big game, or Cinco de Mayo on May 5). Tweetmeme.com even shows the most popular links that people on Twitter have posted, another trick Google hasn't learned yet.

The process works the other way, too; search engines like twist.flaptor.com and Twitter's own search.twitter. com make it possible to search Twitter's collected musings on just about any topic. It's true that the searches more often turn up haystacks of gibberish instead of gems, but it can also be a way to find breaking news.

"Two or three years ago, I would have said RSS feeds were the best way to keep track of a topic. I now think Twitter is better," says Mark Briggs, who runs a software development company and is the author of "Journalism 2.0," a book about new digital reporting methods.

Briggs, who tweets three or four times a day, tries to observe an 80-20 rule: about 80 percent of his tweets add something to the conversation (a link, a fact), and about 20 percent "take" (a request for contacts or information, a link to his latest work). "People aren't going to follow you if all you do is say, 'Check out my new blog post,' " he says. "There's a lot of karma on Twitter. The more you contribute, the more you get out of it."

Stoltz cites Business Week Executive Editor John A. Byrne as a favorite tweeter. Among other things, Byrne will tweet details of the magazine's news meetings and explain its editorial decisions. Gillmor likes the tweets of Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's tech-gadget guru, and Om Malik, a widely followed tech blogger (GigaOm.com). "They don't overdo it," he says.

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