Update: Techcrunch has followed up the article and revealed that the staging was done as PR by The Geek Squad, and was simply picked up by the newspapers. So rather than creating it badly, they repeated it badly.
A recent story did the rounds of UK papers and news bulletins as The Telegraph and The Sun claimed to have found the UK’s oldest Twitter user.
But as Techcrunch revealed, 104-year-old Ivy Bean happened to send her first ever tweet at the same time as the newspapers were writing their stories about her.
‘I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken.’
Which would be one of the two messages she sent which were visible on the photos accompanying the articles.
What’s shocking isn’t that someone thought it was a good idea to ride the Twitter bandwagon with the type of story that fills empty time at the end of a news bulletin.
What’s shocking is that they were inept enough not to bother faking it a bit better – maybe starting the account a day before at least? And not taking a photo of two tweets – the first of which mentions them? Don’t they know tweets are publicly accessible, indexed by Google and archived?
Then again, they’re still running stories about the banality of Twitter written by journalists who normally use the service for a couple of days at most for research, without following or interacting with anyone.
Because obviously searching for the writers, journalists and bloggers who actually understand how the service works is far too much effort.
And when those same articles question the truth behind tweets and retweets around news and events, you might want to point to the fact The Sun managed to get Ivy’s age wrong in it’s headline – her username, IvyBean104 might have been a clue!