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Journalists Emerge From Farmhouse, Talk About Life With Only Facebook

by Caleb Johnson on March 3, 2010 at 09:20 AM


Those French journalists who locked themselves in a farmhouse, with only Facebook and Twitter as links to the outside world, have emerged from their self-imposed exile. What did they learn from their social networking experiment?

Janic Tremblay, a reporter with Radio Canada, talked with NPR about the experience. "You are - if I may say - who you follow," Tremblay told NPR. In other words, it's best to follow credible Twitter accounts if you hope to stay up-to-date on current events. Most of the time, tweets from these verified accounts are retweeted, which means first-hand sources aren't as diverse as one might think.

Still, news could be tough to verify using only Twitter or Facebook. Tremblay said the journalists were scrambling to find out if Carla Bruni, the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was really pregnant during their experiment. (She wasn't.) Another time, Tremblay was having difficulty piecing together a story involving the Montreal police. Within minutes of sending a simple tweet, though, he was bombarded with details by other users.

Judging by this interview, we'd say the journalists managed to stay pretty well-connected during their stay in the farmhouse. That's not surprising, though, considering all the recent news that's broken on Twitter. As smart as journalists are, you'd think they wouldn't need to lock themselves in a farmhouse to figure that out. [From: NPR]

Tags: experiment, facebook, french, journalist, microblogging, news, socialnetworking, top, twitter, web

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