Does It Make Sense to Follow Newspaper Feeds Via Twitter?

A few days back, I started following Twitter feeds from the local newspaper. I’m not exactly sure how they tweet their stories. It may be automated (as they publish or update on their main website), or manual (probably by someone who’s job is to tweet news stories all day. Sweet!). But this got my Twitter homepage getting flooded with news updates, half of which I probably don’t really care about. And so I wonder, does it make sense to subscribe to such a feed?

I’ve always thought of blogs as a pull mechanism of publishing content. This is because you write an article, publish it, and people read it by going to your blog. Those who get to read your published articles are most likely those who actually have an interest in the topic. Of course, one could subscribe to a blog through email or feed readers, too, but for that you have to make an active effort in subscribing or keying in your email. Email newsletters or e-group, on the other hand, push updates to you everytime there’s something new.

But Twitter is an altogether different animal. It’s both push and pull. You can access feeds from someone’s profile page, or you can follow these feeds and be updated automatically on your Twitter home page.

I could, perhaps, just unfollow the newspaper feed and just visit their Twitter homepage in case I needed updates. I think I’d rather be following people who really interact and build relationships through the medium. After all, I could always just “pull” news content straight off the paper’s Twitter profile page.