I’ve been actively using Twitter for several months now, and I really like it. I don’t really use it to stay in touch with friends because, well, not too many of my friends, as young and tech-savvy as they are, actively tweet. But I find it a very useful tool for following and joining large conversations with complete strangers and uncovering hidden gems on the Web. One recent episode, however, kind of bothers me.

Ten days ago, Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu), whose Twitter feed is a staple among my daily online reading, posted the following tweet:

Given my newspaper background, those numbers struck me as kind of low, especially the eight for the Chicago Tribune. To put it into perspective, the sports department alone at my former paper, whose circulation is less than 40,000, produced six stories yesterday, so eight seems ridiculously low for a paper the size of the Tribune (maybe all the reporters were off on unpaid furloughs). So I followed the link that Jay provided, and it pointed to a comment by Geoff Dougherty, who runs Chi-Town Daily News, on a story comparing his operation’s productivity to that of the Tribune and the drastic difference in the two organization’s budgets. Here’s what Dougherty said (third comment from the top; emphasis in bold added by me):

February 23rd – 8:50 p.m.
I should also mention that we’re not aiming to create more content than the Trib or the Sun-Times.

We’re aiming to create more local, public-affairs content. Our readers get their international news from cnn.com and the bbc, and similar sites for national affairs.

What’s at risk with the waning of the Chicago papers is local news.

Today the Trib ran eight local stories.

We’ll run the same number tomorrow with a staff of four and a couple of freelancers and volunteer neighborhood reporters.

With a staff of 26, 18 of them reporters, we’d publish between 10 and 14 local stories a day — a local report far more robust than anything produced today.

It’s also worth noting that, while I’m happy to take credit for this idea, it’s not particularly new or inventive. The plan I’ve proposed is industry standard for covering local news at well regarded regional papers, including several I’ve worked for.

So Dougherty was referring to eight local news stories. At this point, my curiosity was sparked and since I had nothing better to do with my time, I decided to do a little digging (old journalist habits die hard). I went to the Tribune’s Web site and searched their archives to find a list of stories in the Tribune from February 23, the edition from which Dougherty got his count of eight local stories. Unfortunately, the list included AP stories as well. Not one to stop halfway, I found the Tribune’s staff directory and used it to cull the stories list to only those produced by the Tribune staff:

• Shirley Mottl, 1927-2009: Sang in clubs as Sheryl Lea in the 1960s and ’70s By Jeff Long | Story
• New research offers hope for finding pancreatic cancer early By Robert Mitchum
• Shaping Chicago: U. of C. medical school official mentors minority students By Lolly Bowean
• On different pages when it comes to race By Dawn Turner Trice
• Whispers not rattling Bears’ Nathan Vasher By Vaughn Mcclure
• Phoenix rises with defense By Bob Sakamoto
• Brent Lillibridge hopes speed fills need on White Sox By Mark Gonzales
• Ready or not, here comes Tiger Woods By Rick Morrissey | Column
• Bears’ search for safety likely bypasses Lawyer Milloy By Vaughn Mcclure
• Baseball scouts’ honor under fire in kickback scheme in Dominican Republic By Oscar Avila and Todd Lighty
• Illinois defensive tackle suspended indefinitely By Terry Bannon
• Fighting Illini shoot their way past Ohio State By Terry Bannon
• Former White Sox executive David Wilder has seen a big change in fortunes By Oscar Avila and Todd Lighty
• Peaceful, easy training for Cubs this year By Paul Sullivan
• U.S.’ success in winter sports bubbling over By Philip Hersh | Column
• Ex-Sox official Wilder suffers major change of fortune By Oscar Avila and Todd Lighty
• Rant raises profile of CNBC on-air personality Rick Santelli
• By Phil Rosenthal and Tribune Media Columnist | February 23, 2009
• Chicago law firm to cut partner, associate pay by 10% By Ameet Sachdev
• Losses pull curtain back on illusory gains By Greg Burns | Column
• Pop Rocks seller in a fizzy over alleged imitator By Steve Schmadeke
• Trade shows turning to the Web By Eric Benderoff
• Daughter frets over Mom’s toxic marriage By Amy Dickinson | Column
• Jackman brings the pizazz By Maureen Ryan
• New format, host are unable to rescue a plodding telecast By Maureen Ryan
• Mickey Rourke wins Independent Spirit award for ‘Wrestler’ By Mark Caro
• Behind the scenes with Oscar By Mark Caro
• James Earl Jones narrates a fervent ‘Lincoln Portrait’ with CSO By John Von Rhein
• Robots to take over by 2045? Sorry, that does not compute By John Keilman

Even after you throw out the Oscars stories and the columns, there are still a lot more than eight news stories. And if you count sports, there are definitely more than eight local news stories. And yes, I do count sports, because local sports news is still local news (and news that people actually read). And we are not talking about a difference of a couple stories from the count of eight, but a couple times that many. But regardless of how you count local news, for me, the context in which Jay’s tweet framed the number is a bit problematic (eight “news stories” vs. eight “local news stories”). To me, the tweet made it sound like the Tribune staff only produced eight news stories that day when in reality they did a lot more, even if many of them may not fall into a definition of “local news”. The difference is one of choice vs. capacity. It’s one thing to say they should shift more resources to produce a certain category of stories (in this case, local news), but saying “eight news stories” makes it sound like the Tribune, with its giant budget, only produced eight stories of any kind, which would indeed be a huge inefficiency. So I sent the following tweet to Jay:

Around the same time, Kathy Gill sent Jay a tweet as well to also add a quantifier to her count of seven stories in the Seattle Times:

I never got a response from Jay, either on his Twitter feed or via DM, which really doesn’t bother me. It’s not like he’s doesn’t respond when people disagree with him. He’s answered a couple of my tweets before, even when I was questioning points that he was making. Besides, he probably gets hundreds of tweets every day, so it’s understandable that he won’t answer every one. He tweeted, I fact-checked and added clarification, so both are out there for people to consider. Life goes on.

And then …

A couple days ago, while I was poking around on some tech Web site, I came upon a link to this story on techdirt.com. And right there in the second and third paragraphs of the story:

Jay Rosen has been running an interesting experiment trying to find out just how many truly local stories an average newspaper includes in its paper, between all the national wire service stories. A look through a recent Seattle Times issue showed a grand total of seven locally produced stories. And a look at an issue of the Chicago Tribune found a total of eight locally produced stories. We’re not talking about huge numbers here.

And, in fact, the finding of eight stories in the Trib comes from Geoff Dougherty, a guy who created quite a stir in newspaper circles when he claimed he could provide the equivalent (or better) local coverage of the Chicago Tribune for just $2 million a year, and provided the spreadsheet to back it up. And he’s not just talking in theory. He’s doing it. Today. For much less than the Tribune (which is bankrupt).

Now this DOES bother me. For one thing, what Dougherty had originally said — eight local news stories — has now become “eight locally produced stories”, which has a completely different connotation and is exactly the type of “purple monkey dishwasher” misinterpretation I thought the original tweet might lead to. I left a comment on that story pointing it out (it’s No. 28).

The other thing that bugs me, and really the thing that made me write this post, is that while both I and Kathy Gill responded to Jay’s original tweet to add clarification to the information his tweet sent out, apparently only the original tweet was really disseminated. It’s not hard to see why:

• Jay has more than 12,000 followers, while I have a whopping 13. Just about every one of his posts is retweeted, while I can count on one hand (or one finger) the number of my posts that have received the honor.
• Also, Jay gets so many tweets each day that it doesn’t take very long for any one tweet on his Replies thread to get pushed off the first page and likely forever out of sight for many people who follow that thread.

OK, before I get jumped by all 12,426 (as of now) of Jay’s followers, not including myself, let me make it clear:

• I’m not busting Jay’s chops for not bringing attention to the clarifications. Like I said, the man gets so many tweets, some are bound to fall through the cracks, or maybe he just didn’t think the differentiation was worth retweeting. Whatever. That part really doesn’t bother me.
• I certainly don’t begrudge Jay for the number of followers he has compared to my paltry sum. He deserves it. I mean, c’mon, the man writes about migrations and atomizations on his blog, while I write about my cat’s NCAA bracket and funny Chinese street signs. It would be a sad statement about society if I had the same number of followers he does.
• This is not some attempt at playing “gotcha”. I have better things to do with my time.
• I’m not patting myself on the back for noticing the “mistake” or whatever you want to call it. The only reason I started digging was because I’ve been a journalist and thus was familiar enough with the subject matter to know the story count sounded low. If it were some other topic, I would’ve read the tweet and gone on with life without ever suspecting it might be incorrect/misleading while somebody else more familiar with that topic might have had the inkling to do what I did.

But here’s the thing: Part of the beauty about new media is that everybody has a voice and can act as fact-checkers, right? So somebody posts that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, and within a couple hours that is debunked by the collective power of the online realm. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? Well, except in this case, it didn’t really work. The initial tweet was disseminated and eventually cited as supporting evidence for another blog post (one that  distorted the original information even more), which would presumably be disseminated to another audience, and so on. But the two clarification tweets didn’t seem to go anywhere except ever farther back on Jay’s Replies thread.

That brings up this concern for me:

In this supposedly more democratic, more open, more equal, more free-flowing online marketplace of ideas, do the loudest voices — the most visible personalities, the ones with the most followers — still drown out the smaller voices, even though the little guys can now talk back to the big names? Or better yet, do the smaller voices, as a result of their sheer number, drown out each other, thus amplifying the volume of the louder voices? I realize that this was just one instance, and perhaps it’s debatable whether the original tweet was even an error or misleading, but could one not see something similar easily happening again and again, through no malice or attempts at deception or concealment on anyone’s part? People read what the biggest Twitterstars have to say, but they don’t necessarily read the responses from the little voices, especially when those voices are buried amid thousands of others. So when the little guy fact-checks the big names, the fact-checking gets overlooked while the original misinformation spreads.

Isn’t this a little bit like the old days when a newspaper prints an error? Someone can contact the paper and make them aware of the mistake, but if the paper doesn’t print that (or prints it in agate type while the original mistake was in a 70-point headline), then most of its readership only gets the original information but not the correction. The little guy can go around and tell his family and friends all about it, but what’s that? A couple dozen people? Compared to the paper’s readership of tens of thousands?

So does this new media environment already have institutions in the form of star personalities, and do those institutions dominate, frame, and control the conversation like institutions in traditional media had done? The little guys certainly have a voice, but does that voice do any good when it is lost amid an ocean of voices? (And no, these are not rhetorical questions. I’m interested in what you think, even if you think I’m just making a big deal out of nothing).