I don’t know if you’ve ever asked yourself the question from the title, but we’re about to get an answer. AFP writes that five French journalists have agreed to lock themselves in a farmhouse in France for five days, where they’ll write news based only on what they read on Twitter and Facebook.The rules are: no smartphones, no web surfing. They will be given cellphones that cannot connect to the internet, but from the story it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to verify the news they see on Facebook and Twitter (probably not, as the experiment would make little sense then).
It’s actually an intriguing idea. Without the ability to follow the links you see on Twitter and Facebook, what’s left? Most of the time, it’s just tiny tidbits of info with very little substance (since it’s implied that the rest of the information is in the link). Some of the time, the info is completely wrong – shortly after a strong aftershock hit Haiti, I’ve seen one Twitter user frantically urging everyone in Haiti to evacuate because of an upcoming tsunami; it took me a couple of minutes to find out that the info was completely wrong.
However, these French journalists won’t be able to do that: they’ll have to analyze others’ tweets and Facebook updates to weigh in on what’s true and what’s false. But a lot will also depend on their own journalism standards. Reporting a politician’s death immediately after you see it reported on Twitter would be very irresponsible, even if you can’t verify it with a “trusted” source. The journalists in the experiment will have to establish new standards for what can be trusted: perhaps it’s a large number of tweets about an incident, or a large number of tweets from verified accounts. In any case, we’ll be following this experiment closely; it might yield some very interesting results.
source : http://mashable.com/2010/01/22/news-facebook-and-twitter