If you modestly define journalism as telling people what they need to know when they need to know it I think the various British Government twitter streams are getting into the swing of that.

This on David Davis and his resignation as an MP from UKParliament (which uses its biog to describes itself as “Keeping an eye on government, debating laws, raising taxes”) is a good example of what might have once happened in a newspaper – journo rings press office and asks: “so what exactly is the procedure for resigning from parliament?”, press officers checks details and piece is written and appears in paper. This is a modest example of journalism but it does show how much collective efforts press officers and journalists have wasted by duplicating bits of each others jobs. We don’t need the journo to do that anymore. They can do something more useful.

By the way here’s the link to the info on the Chiltern Hundreds.

Update:

Dave Briggs and Ewan McIntosh alerted me to Stratford on Avon District Council starting to use twitter. As Dave says “sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.”  What I like is that the council uses the description of the feed as “Short, simple news” which is a more honest description of how man bodies use twitter – subverting the orignial use of “what are you doing now”.