The Columbia Journalism Review, in light of the New York Times article, Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks is asking, How Should Journalists Use Twitter?

What does Twitter add to the coverage of such stories? What does it subtract? ... Is Twitter anything more than just a stupid human trick? Where does it—where should it—fit into the larger universe of Web-based journalism?

Well, I’m no expert on journalism. I’m a blogger and a microblogger and people always get stuck on the relationship between blogging and journalism. As to Twitter, I have a pretty good ranking according to sites like Twitter grader and I have been on Twitter for over two years now, as well as just about any other microblogging system I can find, so I do have a few opinions.

Recently, I wrote a blog post entitled I Get My News on Twitter.... I talked about tools that I use to organize the information I get from Twitter and emerging tools in the space. This points to two ways that I believe journalists should be using Twitter.

It is a great place to get raw information. It is standing in a virtual crowd, listening for voices that have something to say. When you hear someone saying something interesting, you sidle over to them, listen to what they have to say, and if possible and appropriate, join in the conversation. This is useful for finding people on the ground who are smart and have something to say at a disaster far away, like the terrorism attacks in Mumbai.

It is also useful on a local beat. An editor of a local paper mentioned to me at dinner one evening that his reporters use Twitter to get reports from local emergency services, sort of like a twenty-first century police scanner.

I’m currently trying to get as many of my sources to use Twitter as possible. If something important happens at the capital, I might not get the first call or text message, unless it is a text message sent to Twitter, and then I get it as soon as everyone else, or maybe a little sooner if I’m better at using Twitter than others.

Beyond that, Twitter is a great way of getting your message out. When I create a blog post, Twitterfeed reads my RSS feed and creates a Tweet for me with a link back to my blog post. If I want to be the first person to get a message out, I’ll send a quick headline tweet out letting people know what is going on, and follow up with a blog post later.

I currently subscribe to the Twitter streams of quite a few news organizations. Twitter becomes my news scroll. News organizations that want me as a reader need to try and get in my news scroll.

To me, Twitter isn’t just another stupid trick and while it is using a new medium and a new format, it doesn’t seem all that new either. It sort of reminds me of the teletype at the college radio station that I would gather around with my friends decades ago. It will be interesting to see what other people have to say.

Oh, and by the way, I heard about the CJR article on Twitter.