"Twitter is our competition"

“Twitter is our competition, we have faced up to that reality,” said Matt McAllester, Europe editor at Time.

That’s a controversial start to a nice piece from Abigail at journalism.co.uk, from a Web Summit panel on journalism and social media:

Time reporters such as Moscow correspondent Simon Shuster use Twitter to discover stories that are breaking nearby and head straight there while also “triangulating other tweets” to check if the area is at risk.

“[Shuster] uses Twitter a lot to make sure that it’s safe to go down a certain road and go down a certain place and talk to certain people,” explained McAllester.

He added that Twitter has replaced the role of the mobile phone, once so essential in foreign reporting, allowing more immediate communication with a wider number of people.

Some interesting stuff on long form video from Vice, and the uses of Google+ (shock, horror) from Storyful.