"The Thread" - Journalism in the New Millenium

If Good Night and Good Luck characterizes journalism in the '50s and Spotlight does so for the late '90s/early '00s, The Thread is the movie for the Twitter age. Using the Boston marathon bombings as a backdrop, the film looks at the convergence of traditional and online media, explains the growing influence of social media and analyzes the consequences new technologies have on journalism.

Journalism is compared to gossip, with the essential caveat: "carefully vetted." The movie shows how a thread that initially serves as a news aggregate - crowd-sourced and in real-time - can devolve into a mob frenzy, swayed in every direction by clippings of theories. A purely democratized platform can, with a few wayward cults of personality, turn ugly too fast to catch and too strong to process.

The New Republic's review of The Thread begins with the headline "A New Boston Marathon Documentary Tries—And Fails—to Scare Us About The Internet". I feel the title's reductive. After viewing the film, I'm not scared, but thankful. I'm thankful for journalistic standards, for the patience involved in developing a story to the very end.

The r/findbostonbombers thread was a wildfire, one impossible to wrangle up. You can't put Schrodinger's cat back in the box. Once information is out, it's impossible to pretend like it isn't there or dismiss it. That's why it's so essential that the distribution of information be funneled. Otherwise, people like Sunil Tripathi's family will be hurt by the libel.

Technology's main benefit is speed. However, if we make a faster car that can't turn, the car fails. We don't rebuild the roads to work with the straight-only car. News is the same way. Technology helps us gather a greater wealth of information faster than ever before. This doesn't mean that news now gets to be sloppy or inaccurate. If it is, it isn't journalism. It's gossip.