Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News has launched NewsTopiaville, an interesting project that will “explore how game mechanics can be applied to reinvent the way we produce, consume and interact with news.” The project is ambitious, interesting, and worthwhile.

But I want to clarify something about the term “game mechanics,” which I think is being misused — or at least oversimplified — in the gamification discussion. Without understanding the term’s fuller context, there’s a risk of masking the challenges of gamifying the news.

In the gamification discussion, “game mechanics” typically refers to (in O’Brien’s words) “features like leaderboards, progress bars, rewards, badges, and virtual goods.”

These are indeed game mechanics; I would categorize them as “motivational” or “psychological” mechanics.* (UPDATE: See footnote for another definition.) They can be a big part of what makes people keep playing a video game — what makes us want to play for just five more minutes (which inevitably turns into two hours) to reach the next goal.

But motivational mechanics are not the only kind of game mechanics.

The other major bucket of game mechanics is what is typically referred to as “gameplay.”* In the recent Grand Theft Auto games, for example, gameplay mechanics include:

• Players can explore a large area in a somewhat unordered fashion, rather than being confined to a small space and a prescribed, linear set of tasks.
• Players can drive cars or walk around the game world.
• Players view the game world from a “third-person” point of view, with the camera showing the player’s avatar from a vantage point above and behind the avatar (as opposed to the “first-person” point of view of the Call of Duty games, where the camera shows what the player’s avatar sees).
• Players can punch enemies, pick up knives/bats and swing them at enemies, or pick up guns and shoot enemies.

Gameplay mechanics define a game. They are the game, the play: how you move, what you see, what you do. And while games may be fun or successful partially because of leaderboards or badges,  they’re also — I would say primarily — fun because they are games. Because of the gameplay mechanics.

Wii Sports, for example, is awesome not because of avatars, progress tracking after each game, and the like. It’s awesome at base because of the central gameplay mechanics: You bowl by making a bowling motion rather than by pressing a series of buttons! The gameplay is what makes the game fun.**

But — back to NewsTopiaville — news does not have gameplay mechanics. For most people, consuming news is not fun.

Now, the subjects, activities, and behaviors that have been targeted for gamification — personal health, online profile completion, personal energy use, local-business marketing, personal finance — generally aren’t fun, either. Like news, they lack gameplay mechanics. So the gamification discussion necessarily focuses on how motivational mechanics can be applied to these areas.

There’s clearly huge potential in applying motivational mechanics to not-fun activities. And while smart journo-folks may be able to do for news what Opower is doing for home energy use or what Foursquare is doing for patronizing local businesses, the discussion should start by fully understanding the challenges ahead.

So here’s the challenge, restated more bluntly:

For most people, consuming news is not fun. And news does not have inherent gameplay game mechanics — the core type of game mechanics that make video games fun. Given this, how can motivational game mechanics be used to make news consumption more engaging and/or to get people to consume more news?

Now I wish Chris O’Brien and everyone else in this game the best of luck, and hope I can add some useful ideas along the way.

——

* I’m not sure if there are formal terms for what I call motivational and gameplay game mechanics. I’d be interested to see if/how the nomenclature is formalized in Byron Reeves’ “Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete,” for example, which O’Brien cites as an ur-text on gamification.

UPDATE: This terrific Slideshare by Sebastian Deterding, “Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents,” makes the case that what I call motivational game mechanics  aren’t game mechanics so much as just “gamy patterns of feedback design.” I think I might agree, but without doing a deep dive into other gamification writings, I’m not going to update my main post to reflect this just yet. In any case, this Slideshare is a must-read if you’re interested in gamification. (Found via Marcus Bosch’s excellent gamification primer.)

** Motivational and gameplay mechanics have always been blended to varying degrees. In the original Super Mario Bros., for example, it’s fun to hit “question mark” blocks and otherwise find coins (gameplay mechanic); it’s addicting to try to collect 100 coins to get a 1-Up (motivational mechanic). In the God of War games, it’s fun to use different button combinations to kill enemies in different ways (gameplay); it’s addicting to see the number of strung-together hits displayed on-screen and try to top your last number (motivational).

While I haven’t played Zynga’s Facebook games (FarmVille, CityVille, etc.) my understanding of their genius/deviousness is that they’ve used Facebook’s social aspects to blur the line between motivational and gameplay mechanics to an unprecedented degree. Or maybe they’ve discovered that Facebook’s social aspects represent a kind of hypermotivational game mechanic.

Either way, the underlying gameplay mechanics still have to be compelling enough in order for the social-motivational mechanics to work.

Journalists should read and heed everything Bradshaw writes. But it’s important to make sure the discussion of data doesn’t get too narrowly confined to external data, without considering how journalism itself fits holistically into the data-centric future.

The big challenge for news organizations isn’t just how to better ingest, analyze, and present extant external (if sometimes hard-to-access) data sets. Inculcating a new skill set industrywide may be non-trivial as a matter of scale and institutional-cultural inertia, but at least that skill set is pretty well defined.

Rather, the trickier and less-addressed challenge for news organizations is how to turn the raw materials and finished products of non-database journalism into data.

While Bradshaw begins by defining data broadly as “information that can be processed by computers,” he mostly talks about one specific type of data: spreadsheets and databases containing digitized government and organizational information.

Emphases mine:

The growth of the spreadsheet and the database from the 1960s onwards kicked things off by making it much easier for organisations — including governments –to digitise information, from what they spent our money on to how many people were being treated for which diseases, and where. …

The open data movement campaigns for important information — such as government spending, scientific information and maps — to be made publicly available. …

That means, for instance, a computer can see that the director of a company named in a particular government contract is the same person who was paid as a consultant on a related government policy document. …

Concrete results of both movements can be seen in the US and UK — most visibly with the launch of government data repositories Data.gov and Data.gov.uk in 2009 and 2010 respectively — but also less publicised experiments such as “Where Does My Money Go?“, which uses data to show how public expenditure is distributed, and “Mapumen-tal,” which combines travel data, property prices and public ratings of ‘scenicness’ to help show at a glance which areas of a city might be the best place to live based on individual requirements. …

While government and organizational stats and data sets will be a huge part of journalism’s future, they very likely won’t be the only part — particularly for local news organizations. What Bradshaw refers to as the “base metals” of traditional journalism — “eyewitness accounts and interviews … official reports, research papers” — aren’t going away.

Neither are news organizations’ ever-growing repositories of information about local businesses and people, sports, recreation, travel, entertainment, things to do, etc.

News organizations will best set themselves up for the future if journalists become more skilled at handling external data AND if traditional narrative journalism itself is data-fied (along with the non-narrative information mentioned above).

This isn’t a new idea; Adrian Holovaty, Dan Conover, and Stijn Debrouwere, among others, have been fleshing out this line of thinking for several years. But (generalization alert!) somewhere along the way, the journalism-as-structured-data discussion seems to have been overtaken by the journalists-as-processors-of-external-data one.

I thought about this divergent discussion while reading Mindy McAdams’ recent lament about lack of innovation in mobile/iPad news apps (emphases hers):

I have yet to see an app from any news organization — for a phone or the iPad — that spells innovation. Steve [Yelvington] refers to “completely new information experiences that don’t even vaguely resemble old products,” but whatever these are, I have not seen them.

I agree with McAdams as far as that goes, just as I agree with Bradshaw. But there’s an obvious reason why we haven’t seen “completely new information experiences” in news apps: there’s currently little “completely new information” being created that could power such apps.

After all, there’s a limit to how innovative front-end wizardry can be on its own. There are only so many ways to present largely unstructured stories, blog posts, photos, and videos  – still the vast majority of content produced by news organizations.

Getting to a point where news orgs routinely produce structured (or semi-structured) data — what Conover calls the Informatics Scenario — will require new tools, CMSes, processes, culture, knowledge. You know, no big whoop.

But we shouldn’t let this scenario’s difficulty/unlikelihood turn into a blind spot.

So it’s great to see Sony has more dynamite ideas up its corporate sleeve. Like building an iTunes-like service. Because everyone knows consumers are looking for yet another site where they can pay to download movies/shows, music, and books!

Surely Sony has some secret sauce that’ll make this service stand out from the zillions of other similar services, both living and dead. Take it away, BusinessWeek:

Sony will try to differentiate its service from iTunes. One example: Users will be able to upload videos shot on camcorders, save photos taken with digital cameras, and post other digital content to their personal online accounts. … At some point down the road, Sony would consider letting independent software developers create applications for the service, much the way Apple does for its iPhone.

[Slaps forehead as crickets chirp.]

There’s nothing wrong with Sony trying to build up the Playstation Network library to compete with Xbox Live. But as a plan to turn the company around, it’s a joke.

The problem isn’t just that there are tons of similar services, or that Sony is notoriously adept at crippling hardware and services with DRM and proprietary formats.

The problem is twofold. First, nobody is catching up to iTunes’, or even Amazon’s, music market share anytime soon. Second, the movie/TV download market is still held back by pricing problems, people’s preference to watch movies and shows on a TV, and, most significantly, “release-window” rules that are incompatible with an online-entertainment future.

The L.A. Times’ Ben Fritz and Dawn C. Chmielewski summed up the latter difficulties in an article about Best Buy’s plans for said future:

Beyond competition from free content that can be illegally downloaded, the primary obstacle has been a complex set of rules imposed by studios, which are attempting to nurture their digital distribution businesses without threatening their existing lucrative deals with movie theaters, retailers and pay cable television networks. The result is that consumers often can’t access movies they want when they want them because a film has entered a period of exclusivity during which it is available only through a single distribution outlet, such as the premium cable channel HBO.

If those outdated release-window deals ever die, it’s likely Apple and/or Netflix (and cable companies) will be the distribution beneficiaries.

There’s only one way Sony could conceivably challenge iTunes for music supremacy. This strategy could also lay the groundwork for winning the inevitable movie/TV download wars. But it requires changing the way the music business works.

Sony should get all the record labels to build a jointly owned online music service. The service should undercut all other music store prices by a lot — say, DRM-free MP3s for 50 cents each/$5 an album for older music and 70 cents each/$7 an album for new releases. Even that might not be enough to compete with the iTunes/iPod/iPhone ecosystem, but it would at least have a chance.

The record labels should have done this from the moment Napster first emerged. But they still can pull it off — and only the record labels can pull it off.

If they do this (collectively) in-house, they don’t have to pay a cut of each sale to a technology middleman. And by collaborating, the costs of developing and hosting the service can be shared.

Even with those cost savings, could such dramatically lower pricing work? I don’t know. But since iTunes launched in 2001, nobody has provided a justification for charging 99 cents per track/$10 an album (still the standard, even with variable pricing increasing). It was just accepted as the standard, even though physical CDs routinely sell for $10 at Best Buy and Wal-Mart. (Yes, those are loss leaders. But online stores don’t have packaging and physical distribution costs or a physical retailer’s overhead.)

Almost nine years later, I have yet to see an in-depth analysis of what online music — or online entertainment in general — “should” cost. (Please post a link in the comments if you know of any such articles.) The only attempt at such an analysis I’ve read is a section of Chris Anderson’s 2004 long tail article in Wired; he estimated online music should cost 79 cents per track to reflect the savings from digital delivery.

But there are far greater potential savings, given the changes in the music industry over the past decade. As I wrote in a 2006 review of The Long Tail (the book, which unfortunately did not include the article’s pricing discussion):

[Anderson] assumed that “the costs of finding, making and marketing music” will stay the same, “to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do.”

But a lot has changed since October 2004, when the article appeared. Cheap recording software and video equipment and easy distribution methods like YouTube have allowed millions to contribute to the entertainment long tail. MySpace and new tastemakers like Pitchforkmedia.com and myriad blogs have upended traditional marketing and talent searching. Playlists and recommendations have replaced the function of radio for many people.

The Long Tail thus shows that much of the cost of the industry’s “creative and label side” is merely money wasted on casting about for the next blockbuster.

Even if Anderson’s long tail predictions haven’t entirely panned out, Soulja Boy, Bon Iver, Animal Collective, and any number of recent Pitchfork faves all point toward the same reality: The music industry as it has existed for the past several decades is unsustainable and unnecessary.

Of course, admitting that and adopting my plan would force the major labels — from label chiefs down to aspiring millionaire pop stars — to leave the illogical zillion-dollar entertainment bubble and become more like normal businesses. And while the movie and TV industries are still in far better shape than the music industry, that won’t last forever. A total rethink of how they sell music would help the big entertainment companies prepare for similar disruptions in movies and TV (Hulu is also good preparation). That, too, would require contemplating leaving the bubble.

Which is why, instead, Sony honchos pretend that letting people upload photos will magically save the company.

If I were a shareholder, I’d hope they stop pretending soon.

UPDATE: Added obvious references to cable companies and Hulu.

This is key: “The chief holdup to full-scale conversion from ownership to omni-access is the issue of modification and control. In traditional property regimes only owners have the right to modify or control the use of the property. The right of modification is not transferred in rental, leasing, or licensing agreements.”

We have yet to deal with the legal (and cultural) ramifications of an entertainment world where everything is pure information rather than a physical object, and where you pay to access the information but not to own it. Those ramifications deserve an article or book of their own.

I first became aware of the post-CompuServe Internet when my brother was in college, circa 1992. I was so excited that he somehow had access to all the important information I couldn’t find anywhere else: namely, the special moves for Street Fighter II. I think Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam secrets were also big on my list of Net-procured info, but Street Fighter was the main treasure.

I remember my brother mentioning Archie and Veronica — two early search engines — and I had no idea what he was talking about, though I must have used one or both to find the video game tricks. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I used a Web browser. In my memory, browsers just exist after a point.

Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the Vanity Fair piece…

Marc Andreessen (Mosaic/Netscape/Ning maven), on making a graphical program to access the Internet:

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there’s all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet’s not mentioned. Even in Wired.

My first thought after reading that was, Then what the heck was in the first issue of Wired? But after a quick glance at the first issue, I see that Andreessen is maybe exaggerating just a tad. (The Wired article that does mention the Internet — possibly a library/academic version if you want to be charitable toward Andreessen’s memory — includes this pre-file-sharing sentiment that’s either prescient or quaint [italics added]: “If someday in the future anybody can get an electronic copy of any book from a library free of charge, why should anyone ever set foot in a bookstore again?”)

In the unheeded-visionary department, we have two gems. First is Silicon Graphics/Netscape Communications founder Jim Clark:

One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with the Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.

Ummm, good thing there were so many media folks who paid attention to people like Jim Clark.

Then there’s Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who had an even more specific pitch/warning for newspapers:

The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo, or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.

The luddite ignorance would almost be funny if not for the current havoc that stems pretty much directly — albeit a decade in the making — from said ignorance.

Of course, the Internet being the Internet (i.e. awesome), I also came across two posts today that show how far ahead of the technology curve journalists are in many respects.

First (via the always-excellent Hitsville) is a story from the Arizona Republic about a fight between Phoenix’s mayor and a county sheriff. In the course of reciprocal investigations, the sheriff sought six months worth of Phoenix officials’ e-mails. Can you guess how the information was delivered? No — not by burning the material on a CD. That would be too easy and cheap! Instead, they printed out more than 10,000 pages and scanned them, costing $2,000 in taxpayer money. (Though as Bill Wyman points out at Hitsville, the paper somehow construed this as saving taxpayers money.)

And finally, we come to this fully reassuring quote from a John McCain campaign official (via The Plank):

You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.

I can see the bumper sticker now: “McCain in ’08: He kinda sorta knows about that Internet thingy!”

Take two recent reviews from PC Magazine and PC World. PC Mag gave four stars (out of five) and an Editor’s Choice award to the Westinghouse TX-52F480S 52-inch LCD. I still have an old 32-inch CRT set, so I’m always on the lookout for good flat-panel tellies to file away for when we’re ready to upgrade. But despite the rating, this review was absolutely no help in my mental TV search.

The first paragraph says “this set has picture controls that help its more than two million pixels deliver crisp, detailed images” and calls it “a terrific value for a large-screen 1080p HDTV.” The rest of the review consists of lists of features I don’t really care about or techno-geek discussions of image quality.

First there are four paragraphs about the bezel, dimensions, remote, A/V ports, and input detection. The first real mention of image quality comes six paragraphs in, noting

a handy picture-scaling option that eliminates overscan when displaying 720p and 1080i/p HD video. This scaling can be achieved over component video input as well as through HDMI. Standard-definition (SD) images were overscanned by an acceptable 6 percent.

I don’t know or care what picture-scaling and overscanning are. Judging by this mention, I think I should care — but the review doesn’t explain why or what these terms mean in plain English.

Next we have paragraphs about color settings, brightness, and contrast ratio. From reading up a bit on TVs, I at least know what these terms are. But this means nothing to me: “dark-video black levels coupled with a correctly calibrated picture produced an average contrast ratio of 1186:1, a new record for an LCD in a darkly lit room.” What does that mean for actual human beings watching the TV in their living rooms?

Finally we get two paragraphs that talk image blur and jaggedness in terms of real-world use, with examples of Indiana Jones’ hat and Darth Vader’s helmet. Those are interspersed with more lab-test-speak like:

Despite some stumbles on the HD HQV Benchmark test, performance with HD material was good. As with the SD version, the HD benchmark test highlighted the TX-52F480S’s inability to eliminate jagged edges along moving bars on the suite’s video-reconstruction test.

The review concludes, “Overall, the TX-52F480S sets the current standard for what you should expect in an LCD TV priced at around $2,000.” Overall, I would never buy this TV set because to an average reader like meself, the review in no way reflects this conclusion.

A good review wouldn’t go down the checklist of TV features and talk about each in turn — just as a good movie review doesn’t go down the checklist of acting, directing, script, sound, cinematography, set design, costume design. A good review would explain in real-human terms why this TV’s image quality — the only feature that actually matters — is better than other TVs’. And it would do so at the top of the review, not eight paragraphs in.

Moving on to digital cameras, PC World’s review of the Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS has the same flaws as the PC Mag review. There’s a mention of “outstanding image quality” in the first paragraph, but then we get four paragraphs about the lens, “burst capability,” rounded edges, buttons and menu, white balance, and face detection. The sixth and penultimate paragraph is this:

In our lab tests, the SD1100 scored higher on overall image quality than nearly all of its competitors. On the sharpness scale, only a handful of the cameras we tested beat the SD1100 (including Kodak’s EasyShare V1253, Fuji’s FinePix F50fd, and Casio’s EX-Z1080), but they all cost more. To combat camera shake in low-light situations, Canon added its Optical Image Stabilizer feature, but I found its presence pretty unnoticeable–as it likely would be on most point-and-shoots.

Image quality is the one thing that should matter to average camera users. Yet this paragraph talks only about lab tests. It isn’t accompanied by examples of actual photos taken with this camera, juxtaposed with other cameras’ shots so readers can compare the two.

I realize these are both “enthusiast” magazines/Web sites, and readers are assumed to both understand and geek out over these technical terms and features (CNet’s review of the Canon camera has the same problems). But even a tech-savvy reader looking for a camera or TV isn’t going to buy a product because of the remote or menu buttons.

This reviewing style has filtered out of the enthusiast press. In his recent review of small high-def camcorders, the New York Times’ David Pogue spends 745 words talking about the video-cams’ features and descriptions before getting to the first big flaw — that they have no wide angle, so are useless for non-zoomed shots. It takes him 922 words before he gets to the most important part of any video camera: the image quality. And surprise! It turns out these cameras kinda stink:

When you hear “high definition,” you expect what you see in the TV stores: breathtaking sharpness, stunning color.

Unfortunately, “high definition” refers only to the number of pixels in the picture — not how good they are. On these cameras, they’re not very good.

Why is this not the lede of the review? Who cares about how small the things are, what sort of “sharpish edges” they have, if the cameras fail in their main function?

Here’s my philosophy for tech reviews: Don’t spend more than one paragraph on specs or anything else readers can find on the company’s Web site or press release (unless certain specs are relevant to your overall point). Don’t focus on lab tests and jargon; instead, use lab benchmarks as a supplement to real-world use and real-world language to evaluate a product’s primary functions. Most important, focus your review on the purpose of the product. If it’s a printer, the most important thing is print quality. For a scanner, camera, videocam, or TV, it’s image quality. The rest is techie noise.

(You can decide for yourself how well I’ve followed my own advice in these reviews of the PSP, a virtual-reality headset, and the Xbox 360 — though time has made my initial 360 criticisms moot.)

But I have two big issues with Twitter so far, or more like one and a half maybe. One is a general criticism, and one is specific to journalism. The latter issue suggests that while the kind of information-delivery that Twitter represents will be increasingly important to newspapers and journalism, Twitter itself might not be the best way for newspapers to harness this new info-delivery mindset.

The general problem is that URLs count toward the 140-character limit for each Twitter post. Jeff Jarvis asked recently: “Are we losing a wealth of link knowledge on Twitter because it’s all going through TinyURL and other services that truncate addresses so they’ll fit?” It’s a good question. On a less global-Web scale, it’s annoying not knowing where someone’s Twitter links are sending you. There’s often not enough space for a Twitterer to indicate who they’re linking to, and readers can’t mouse over the link to find out (because it’s just a tinyurl or the like).

An easy workaround would be to make URLs invisible to the character count. This wouldn’t result in extra-long, strange-character-filled Twitters because the posts already automatically truncate long URLs with an ellipsis. And it would resolve both my petty annoyance and Jarvis’s worry about Twitter links not counting toward the Web’s internal knowledge.

The bigger issue is that Twitter’s 140-character maximum is an arbitrary cutoff that may limit the program’s (system? tool? what is Twitter?) usefulness for journalists.

I asked in a recent Twitter post whether it’s a breach of protocol to continue a thought in a second post. To me, that violates the spirit of the 140-character limit. But if you can’t do that, Twitter is somewhat useless to newspapers. Try getting a full quote into a single Twitter post; unless your source is unusually pithy, it’s very hard. Now try covering a City Council meeting or other event without including a single quote. It seems that following the 140-character limit would result in much more impressionistic news coverage.

If it is okay to continue a thought in multiple subsequent posts — well, why bother having a character limit at all?

Maybe impressionistic, real-time, multiply authored news coverage is okay. Daniel Victor gave a wonderful example of Twitter-as-news-coverage a couple weeks ago, when truckers staged a protest in Harrisburg. Here’s a portion of a Twitter thread from that day:

bydanielvictor: Trucks blaring horns on 2nd Street in protest of gas prices. Normally I’d be amused but they woke me up. Was looking fwd to sleeping in. (9:32 a.m.)

bydanielvictor: Thought it was a Three Mile Island alarm or some other apocalypse notification system. (9:32 a.m.)

gotwalt: Hundreds of tractor trailers driving by the office honking their horns to protest gas prices. It’s like a hangover simulator. (9:34 a.m.)

Victor contrasted the Twitter coverage with a newspaper’s, concluding that “this experience on Twitter shows how the supposed immediacy of blogging just won’t be immediate enough as more people find their way to services like Twitter.”

It was a great example of Twitter at work, but does it really point to the future of news coverage? What if you want to know more about why the truckers are striking? Are their claims fair, can the state legislators do anything about it, etc.? On the other hand, the paper probably went into these details in a preview story, or could do a follow-up. I guess if truckers are blaring through your city, at that moment you’re probably less interested in policy details and more about the immediate details an impressionistic Twitter feed could tell you.

Even if those immediate details are what readers want, the 140-character limit could make things unwieldy once many more people are using Twitter. As I commented on Victor’s post:

One of my general worries about getting wrapped up in Twitter is that it could be a massive time-suck going through hundreds or thousands of postlets. What if that happened on a small scale with news stories?

Would coverage of, say, a presidential debate or inauguration, or a political rally, or a county fair, be overwhelming if you had to sort through 150 different Twitter feeds or posts on it? Granted, 150 snippets of different points of view could be more interesting, but simply the logistics of getting your news that way could get tiring, it seems.

So I’m back to the arbitrariness of that 140-character max. Ultimately I’m not sure why multiple 140-character Twitter posts are better than a simple live-blog. Or better than multiple non-truncated Twitter posts. Particularly for events or stories that involve people talking (which is most stories), the Twitter model won’t work as well as a live-blog that actually has space for quotes.

It’s not an either/or situation. Twitter could work fine for certain kinds of stories. Even for events involving people speaking, sometimes quotes don’t matter; at an iPod unveiling, for example, I don’t always care about Steve Jobs’s PR-crafted pitches. And newspapers certainly should be internalizing and implementing the kind of news delivery Twitter represents: real-time, partly reader-generated, link-friendly.

But while the 140-character limit largely defines Twitter, it might be too arbitrarily strict for wholesale newspaper adoption.