'Twitter and Facebook are like personal wire services that filter the constant flow of information across the Web'

Says Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton. See, "At The Post, reporters get socialized to social media."

And here's this from Post writer Jura Koncius, who has 1,300 followers on Twitter:

Part of being on Twitter is “shameless self-promotion,” Koncius says; “you are your own public relations person” in journalism today. But another part is to engage in a conversation with sources and readers, showing them what interests you and what might interest them. And they respond in kind, showing her things she didn’t know before, Koncius says. “It enhances my day, it provides a smile.”

I've been on Twitter over two years now. I enjoy it. But I don't use it aggressively or addictively. Frankly, I should be using it more. The one thing about it that can't be beat is the instantaneous news reporting. I was blown away at the power of Twitter during the Iranian democracy protests in 2009. The quantity and quality of all kinds of news and social media at the time was transformational. I spoke differently about technology during my lectures. This kind of thing happens often if you're on Twitter quite a bit, but the last time I felt like that was when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden. Keith Urbahn, a former staffer for Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted it, and it took off around the Twittersphere. By the time President Obama gave his national address I'd been tweeting for more than 90 minutes, and I was able to post on the release of the initial fake pictures to great effect. Thus it seems really weird that Washington Post writers are just now getting seminars in social media. None of these tools are new. It's the professional norms that are lagging.