There’s a wealth of great blog posts reporting/observing/filtering yesterday’s events at the microblogging and journalism conference, Media140.

To name but a few:

We Are Social at #media140 by we are social
Media 140 – The future of real-time news from you talking to me-dia?
Adam Tinworth’s round-ups
Kevin Anderson’s posts on Guardian.co.uk

One question that arose: does a 140-character update equate to journalism?

If it comes from a news organisation/journalists does this make it more journalistic? What about eyewitness reports of news events, for example?

Speaking personally, recent coverage of news events – using Twitter as one element – such as Al Jazeera’s tweets from Gaza, UK newspapers’ tweeting of the budget and G20 protests have provided me with breaking news, relevant contextual links and real-time insight.

As Suw Charman-Anderson commented (appropriately on Twitter): ‘isn’t journalism just polished-up conversations?’ – the conversations encouraged by social media use.

You can also add the question: does it need to be defined?

Perhaps, to a certain extent for news orgs, it does – with regards to accuracy, verification, regulation.

But as a format using Twitter in combination with other multimedia tools and outlets can create a new grammar for presenting news – and a way to unpack ‘journalism’ from its box and show the context, links to and conversation around what would previously have been a standalone ‘news item’.