By Dana Hashem
I turned a tweeting corner yesterday. When several colleagues started calling in the morning to say they were stuck in traffic around London Bridge, it was obvious something was up.
Curious to find out the cause of the disruption, I instinctively turned to Twitter to find out what was going on. For the first time since joining the micro-blogging site, I acknowledged that it was more likely to deliver the answers I was looking for than Google (my usual first point of call for news-related searches), marking something of a landmark shift in my usual browsing behaviour.
I wasn’t disappointed either – by simply searching for the hashtag #LondonBridge, I instantly got the lowdown on what had happened and was able to access information and pictures that were not yet available anywhere else on the web.
It seems I’m not alone in my break from habit. A new reputation survey by PR Week shows that while Joe Public doesn't yet view Twitter as reliable news source, 43 percent of those surveyed think that it is often the first source to break stories.
I suspect the jury will be out for quite a while on whether Twitter can ever be taken seriously as a reliable source of information, but I for one am a convert and look forward to seeing how it shapes our consumption of news in years to come.
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