To launch issue #86 ‘Making the News’ COLORS magazine have created a ‘News Machine’, which you tweet your headline to and it replicates the modern media’s mangling of information and spits out its own interpretation. COLORS explain the process on their site as –
“Twitter is the largest and least verifiable wire agency in the world. Tweet your story to @colorsmachine and watch the message change as it echoes through different media and into print.
A megaphone will read your tweet out loud. Its tape recorder listens, converting what it hears into text so that the television can show it onscreen. A camera watching the television converts what it sees into a signal to the radio antenna, which broadcasts the tweet. And the waiting microphone interprets this radio address as text again for printing.
Pick up your receipt. Compare the original tweet with the final report. Accuracy of reproduction varies according to the clarity of your writing and to chance.”
Unfortunately, as I’m writing this post the machine is offline (I think it’s being re-located) so I can’t send a test tweet to it, but I’ll keep my eye out for when it’s back up and add the results!
If you’d like to read more, or have a play with the News Machine you can visit COLORS’ website here
