Psst, come here! Yeah, you, over there, with the yellow tinge running all over your face and far too much time on your hands, sitting there, idly trolling through the web looking for your next fix of pointless information to repeat to your friends in an even more pointless fashion. Yeah, that’s it, you! Let me tell you a little secret… one that I’ve really tried to keep quiet for the best part of the year, not that I’m ashamed or anything, and not that you’re probably not already aware, but just because it may be a little bit boring, but anyway… I fucking love Twitter.

Like, I really love it. I spend more time on it than anything else, I tweet more than I sleep. I tweet outside, inside, upside down, whilst having sex, whilst on the toilet, I tweet trying on shoes, making toast and shaving. Hell, I’ve tweeted in my dreams three times before. But I love it for reasons you may not quite expect.

Twitter is the best thing on the internet right now, and I really don’t care if you disagree. You hear the same thing all the time from the boring doubters; “It’s not as good as Facebook, it doesn’t have pictures”, “It’s just a load of people talking at each other”, “It’s only good for celebrities”. It’s this latter part that completely defines Twitter for me: Celebrities. But I don’t mean following them or caring about anything at all that comes from their scabby, money-grabbing fingers (even though Peter Serafinowicz is absolutely HIGHLARRYOOS on there). Oh God no. As if I care about the words of some egotistical, vain, self-obsessed show off who only cares about his own opinions and isn’t a single bit arsed about anyone else’s (err…).

The true reason I totally bum Twitter to death isn’t to hear, acknowledge or understand why Jonathan Ross is still banging on about Sachs-gate, or why Stephen Fry wants to make love to a tiny chimp-like creature, no, I bum Twitter ‘cos I like the celebrity death rumours that seem to occur almost all the time.

With this ever growing list of famous people dying throughout the year, people across the globe seem to have really been inspired by all these dead celebrities. One bored person decides to make a mock up of a popular, trusted news provider and, usually never actually intending on it going further than a few friends who are no doubt ‘in on the joke’, they link it on their Twitter.

Then some numb nuts (usually a slightly stalkerish fanboy/fangirl) happens to search for said celebrity, sees the tweet, believes the hype and passes it on to all their silly little followers.

About a month ago, before attempting to enter the land of nod, I saw Zach Braff on the trending topics. Which would be odd ‘cos Zach Braff just left Scrubs and was probably sat at home, crying in the corner, smashing his against the wall screaming “idiot!” whilst waiting for his career to completely nosedive. But people probably wouldn’t have known that.

Actual photo of Braff pre skull-bashing

Anyway, so news spreads that Braff had died when really he was fine and dandy and probably a tad confused. Apparently it all started from this website – which has now been changed to some kind of statement explaining all what happened, including Braff himself calling the guy a “douchebag”.

I, of course, find it all hilarious, the way such ‘news’ can travel around the world in an instant – to the point where actual news providers have to come out and deflate the claims – just ‘cos some geek in the States knows how to use Photoshop a little bit.

It’s happened tonnes of times though, and always with the most random of celebrities. When Patrick Swayze died a few weeks ago, I remained sceptical for hours until the beeb finally reported it, simply because I was pretty sure I’d heard about him dying at least three times in the past, and I might have already thought he was dead and still not given a shit.

A lot of these hoaxes tend to follow the exact same pattern as well, presumably because of any such web-page generator they’re using. In 2006 – obviously pre-Twitter – Tom Hanks was the subject of a mass e-mail rumour when someone clocked on to a website stating that he’d “fallen off a cliff somewhere in New Zealand”. Obviously this wasn’t true, he was in California or somewhere else utterly generic, but people believed it so his people had to make a statement.

A mere few months later, the same thing happened Tom Cruise. Like, exactly the same. He also conveniently fell off some cliffs in New Zealand. And people still believed it. Admittedly it’s quite a rural country and no doubt those cliffs are some slippery motherflippers, and maybe they weren’t signposted enough or something, but who’d have funk those cliffs would kill two Hollywood stars in a matter of months? If I were famous I’d stay well clear of New Zealand, let alone it’s cliffs.

But wait, hang on, the holy grail of celebrity death hoaxes, and probably Twitter peaking in its own brilliance

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Those of you who look keen-eyed over the jobs section in newspapers must have noticed the journalism vacancies advertised by The Guardian over the past month.

With advertising, circulation and staff all being subject to cuts, it’s surprising to see a 12 month freelance position up for grabs. The Guardian is recruiting “beatbloggers” in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh to document happenings in the community, as part of the Guardian Local campaign. While jobs in the media are slim pickings at the moment (does anyone still work in newspapers, or are we just reading archive manuscripts?) it’s reflective of the way the media will evolve in the future.

Citizen journalism, it seems, is the way forward.The ascent of blogging, social networking and rapid upload means that anyone can be a journalist, anywhere.While this raises issues about the quality of journalism being sustained, the fact remains that the media has been democratised like never before. With local newspapers in rapid decline, there is a fear that local authorities will be allowed to become corrupt. However, this hyper-local style of citizen reporting could help keep checks and balances on public institutions, as well as giving opportunity to people who traditionally saw the media as a closed and elitist world.

Getting a job in the media, and in particular as a journalist, has never been more difficult, but at this rate, the balance has somewhat been shifted in the advantage of the individual, not the organisation. The New York Times and Newsweek have announced massive cuts, and are panicking as to what to do next. We’re talking huge companies here, who are scrabbling around desperately to find ways to sustain their outdated business models.

Meanwhile an army of online bloggers provide easily accessible opinion and art available online for free. Granted, the development of the blog as a popular media platform has meant that a lot of self indulgent, narcissistic material gets produced. But at the same time, global networks are being set up between users, content is freely exchanged, criticised and promoted. At last month’s Journalism Leaders conference in Preston, Frederic Filloux, author of Monday Note blog, stated that the future lay in the mobile phone, and once technology was significantly improved, we would truly be able to produce and have access to news 24 hours a day.

I always think that there will be room for good quality analysis and comment in newspapers. I’ve yet to see anything that’s available exclusively online, bar The Huffington Post, that can consistently outclass broadsheet newspapers. But maybe I’m missing the point. Instead, online journalism needs to find it’s own niche. There’s no going back from this, the internet has opened up a whole range of opportunities to the media and to the individual. Where we go from here is unclear, but what is clear is that media corporations will have to gain greater understanding of the way the web works and how people want their news.

Joseph Stashko-Adamaszek

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