News.com.au
FIVE journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.
Twitter and Facebook's use as news-breaking tools has been highlighted over the past year, particularly during opposition protests in Iran that many media described as a "twitterised revolution".
This month, Twitter played a key communications role in quake-hit Haiti, with users sending harrowing personal accounts, heart-rending pictures and cries for help.
But how will the world look if viewed only through the prism of these sites, whose phenomenal growth has been fuelled by smartphones and, for Twitter, online bursts of 140 characters?
Are these social media - which between them have nearly 400 million users - really the serious threat to established media they are often said to be?
