Tweet as a kind of news or new (postmodern) journalistic genre?

Abstract

The article presents the characteristics of Twitter – the new online medium. The author considers the genology of tweets and puts the question: whether they are another variation of the news or maybe they represents a new (post-modern) journalistic genre? Twitter is existing since 2006 as a social media. It was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. According to the most recent data on Twitter is now registered more than 500 million users (active circa about 140 million), who generate 340 million tweets a day. It is assumed that the Tweet does not exceed 140 characters. The analysis of the content of Tweets posted by Polish journalists and politicians on Twitter shows that tweets are information (announcements, headlines, mentions, flashes), comments, opinions, explanations, assessments, gossips, polemics, conversations, questions, answers, quotes, hyperlink, footages and photos. Tweets pull news out of the context, move it to another reality, sometimes even we do not know what they refer to. There are vague, unclear, incomplete and infinite. Tweets are missing all characteristics of the paradigm of news: they do not have the structure of inverted pyramid (separate leads, body, title, or background, and so on). They respond to limited set of questions of news and refer to the few news values. The author concludes that the tweet is the new, only online, hybrid and polymorphic journalistic genre. Posing as news tweets describe more themselves than the outer reality.