http://gigaom.com/2012/12/15/its-not-twitter-this-is-just-the-way-the-news-works-now/

where you and the commentors make some of the same comments/thoughts that I did. I do think that just because this is the way real time reporting is done today, doesn’t mean that it has to be that way. I think we should be pushing for options because the current process is broken.

You’re absolutely correct, mistakes are not limited to the Twittersphere – the news agencies in their rush to be first are making as many errors as the crowd. But with the 140 character limitation the tweet almost by definition is misleading on most anything of substance. And the fact that it generally isn’t viewed as a stream from beginning to end through something like Storify versus at a point in time means that the correction to mistakes often aren’t seen. Whereas the news agencies often get it just as wrong, but because they recap and review every 15 minutes the mistakes get debunked much more easily.

What Carvin was trying to do around providing some clarification on his tweets is where I believe the change should be made. Some way to have more of a wikipedia approach where the “story” is updated in place versus the publishing of one tweet at a time. If the individual tweet had the one piece of information that was to be conveyed, but also had a link to the full story where all the facts were aggregated, then the crowdsourced approach makes more sense. I’m not saying that’s easy, or even possible, especially around real time, but that is where I have an issue with twitter.