We need you Big Brother

I read this earlier today

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

......

...how would the world look if viewed only through the prism of these sites, whose phenomenal growth has been fuelled by smartphones and, for Twitter, online bursts of 140 characters?

Are these social media -- which between them have nearly 400 million users -- really the serious threat to established media they are often said to be?

Those are the questions the five reporters hope to answer when they retire for five days from February 1 to a farmhouse in France's southern Perigord region.

Journalists playing Big Brother style entertainment to test Social Media?. This is MSM meta-entertainment methinks. The daft thing is that they will only use Twitter and Facebook, thus they won't be allowed to follow the links that people put up on Twitter or Facebook through to the Web pages they are pointing to (no other media exposure allowed), which shows that they totally miss the point - certainly of Twitter style news.

Matthew Ingram thinks it won't help for another reason, in that its an experiment designed more to "prove" that they are no substitute for old media (thank heavens) - which is true as:

The reality is that no single source is ever enough, whether it’s Twitter or a phone call from a source at City Hall. Social media hasn’t changed that. And the most important aspect of new media is that it is (to use an overused word) an ecosystem. News can begin on Twitter, make its way through Facebook and other networks to blogs and then meet up and merge with reports from the traditional media.

For this to be work they need to be able to see the story where the links go (or maybe their real role is to prove that Twitter won't work if Paywalls go up )

The other thought I had - untested - is that if you had good enough filtering systems Twitter just may give you all the news. Now that would be a scary thing for journalists trying to confirm Big Brother style media in a Big Brother House