The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink

teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."

This is how all news should be

[notarockstar1979]

There is no good reason for tons and tons of information in news articles. This boils everything down to the essentials and puts it into a format that everyone can understand. Good for you The Guardian! /joke

Poor April Fools Day

[Azaril]

You'd think that after the story yesterday [slashdot.org], they would come up with something a little less obvious. The whole premise of the fools joke is to get people to believe it, at least temporarily. How can a paper, who only 24 hours before complained about the lack of funding on the internet, possibly goto an internet only distribution system? I might be getting old, but in my eyes, no april fools joke will ever match up to the seminal BBC prank [bbc.co.uk]. Now to stop those damn kids skateboarding on the sidewalk...

Sigh ...

[krou]

... whatever happened to believable April Fools stories? It was a lot more fun when you could really get fooled instead of just being able to discount a story within the first line. (Kids, get off my lawn, too!)

Fox News

[brkello]

I think this would be a better format for Fox News. I mean really, 140 characters is more than enough for them. "Liberals!" "Socialism!" "Baby killers!" "Obama's recession!" "Tax and Spend!" "Destruction of marriage!" "Easy on terrorists!"

Heck, I think that pretty much sums up all of Fox News right now. I guess they can just shut down and open up the air ways for some real journalism. How about a 24/7 Daily Show channel?