Twitter Your Dead

Via the Danger Room, I learn that the U.S. military has embraced Twitter in Afghanistan–to post tallies of enemy dead:

If prevailing wisdom about “population-centric” counterinsurgency holds, why is the U.S. military using Twitter to post body counts? Apparently, it’s about maintaining the support of the population back at home.

At the media conference I attended yesterday, there was much chatter from the panel members–including the editor representing the WSJ–about how they liked using Twitter as a “curator” of the news. In a similar vein, one of the conversation themes revolved around finding “what readers are interested in.” No doubt that’s important but it becomes problematic if newspapers start to follow the methodology Nick Denton uses to shape Gawker content, which is to measure the page views of its most popular content.

For example, Denton, the founder of Gawker and a panel member, said he discovered that posts of ivy league school gossip ranked much higher in page views than posts of, say, Britney Spears. That told him which kind of gossip his readers preferred.

This issue of using page views to determine reader habits is not new. But so far as I know, such a barometer hasn’t been used by traditional newspaper editors to shape what stories should be covered. Given how ubiquitous personal customization of news has become (Nicholas Kristof talked about this in a recent column, entitled, “The Daily Me“), maybe the day isn’t far off when newspapers closely align their content with what readers are most interested in. That’s a problem, for obvious reasons.