Social Media

Call 2012 the year that TV got social -- real social. And if you want the moment of moments, it came in the first debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, when someone created the #SaveBigBird hashtag on Twitter after the GOP challenger said he wanted to cut funding for “Sesame Street.” Talk about losing the battle but winning the war. Even though the president got hammered during that debate in...

In the Newtown massacre, as in all such tragic events in a free and open society, both the news and social media went all-out to provide the fullest coverage of what happened and why. The latter is not yet fully known. In too many instances, though, the legitimate quest for the truth was accompanied by abuse. The hordes of print, radio and television reporters who descended on the grieving suburban Connecticut town generally pursued their grim business with due respect for the shattered sensitivities of the families and friends most immediately involved, the ancillary victims of the semi-automatic weapon attack.

The performance of some of the biggest media outlets in the country Friday would be laughable if the story they were covering wasn't so horrific and tragic: 20 children slaughtered in their classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. And for several hours, AP and network and cable TV news misidentified the gunman to millions of readers and viewers as Ryan Lanza. They linked to his Facebook page and ran pictures and information from his account on the air and in print.

From #SaveBigBird and #womeninbinders, to #Lauerfail and #DrunkDianeSawyer, it seems like we are awash in stories with hashtags these days --stories about the 140-character wonders of Twitter and their impact on media and politics. And while there is no shortage of reporting on the latest record number of tweets on any given topic, it feels like the faster the stories about social media come, the further we fall behind the curve of understanding how they are shaping the culture or what they might be trying to tell us about ourselves.

After spending Saturday night listening to and writing about a Baltimore blogger who webcast and tweeted throughout a five-hour standoff with a police S.W.A.T. unit, I promised myself at least 24 hours to try and coherently think through the meaning of the event. Beyond the things I said Saturday night about the webcast and Twitter conversation being two more great examples of the way the Internet and social media continue to change so many aspects of American life, there are a couple of other media takeaways that stay with me and are worth thinking about.

The arrest of a Baltimore blogger this weekend showed how a normally mundane bit of police work - the serving of a warrant - can be complicated in an age of Twitter and Internet radio. It briefly put a national spotlight on what normally wouldn't even make the local news. Frank James MacArthur, 47, a steady presence as an observer at city crime scenes and a cab driver by trade, took to Twitter and an online radio service to stream his dealings with police at his home Saturday to execute an arrest warrant connected to 2009 weapons charges for which he had received probation before judgment.

A Baltimore blogger wanted on a court-issued warrant refused to come out of his home for hours, broadcasting his discussion with a police negotiator live on the Internet before turning himself in peacefully. Frank James MacArthur, 47, was taken into custody outside his home in the 600 block of McKewin Ave. at about 11 p.m. - timed, he said, for local news stations - after a standoff lasting more than five hours and which involved the department's SWAT team. Police were there to serve a warrant issued in June by his probation agent stemming from a 2009 gun case and another for subsequent failure to appear in court, according to court records, and the situation was ratcheted up after police said MacArthur made threatening statements to officers over social media.

Twitter and web radio carried a new kind of prime-time crime drama in Baltimore Saturday when a Waverly man refused to allow police to serve a warrant and then broadcast the ensuing standoff after a S.W.A.T. team arrived. He was on the air live Saturday night for more than 5 hours, much of it spent talking to a police negotiator before surrendering peacefully. Another day and night in the brave, new world of social media… Frank James MacArthur, a cabdriver, who tweets, blogs and broadcasts on the Internet as The Baltimore Spectator, left the airwaves just before 11 p.m. saying, “All right, it's 10:57.

Today is my last day at The Baltimore Sun. It's been an amazing 12 years at this newspaper. I started here as an editorial assistant on the business desk. I covered business news for years -- from the fall of Bethlehem Steel to the rise of Millennial Media. I also spent several years covering Baltimore's police department and crime. Along the way, I grew incredibly interested in technology, from the gadgets and Internet services that were changing my profession to the people and companies that were on the cutting edge here in Maryland.

In the past, Americans watched the presidential debates and heard the TV and newspaper commentary afterward. In 2012, however, the setup changed. This year, instead of watching the debates, citizens read live, moment-to-moment commentary on the event via Twitter, the social networking site. In 140 characters or less, users of Twitter (over 500 million worldwide) can tweet about anything and everything, including how the presidential candidates were performing in the debates. People could watch the debate on television while simultaneously tweeting about it from their laptops.