This gossipy “hive” narrative yields little new information, despite that it has the look and feel of news (stock file videos and stills of the “Jackass” guys being Jackasses and a lame movie of the “crime scene” two hours after the fact designed, cynically, to draw hits).

For journalism students, the result of such coverage is not just that they’re prone to emphasize unmediated narrative, or superficial gossip, when the time comes to report their own stories, but that they aren’t necessarily hungry for a scoop, because the new media ecosystem often feels like one big collective story where the “news” is a best-fit line between different outlying points of absurdity, first-person narrative, and “expert” speculation. —MediaShift . The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative | PBS.