USA Today story completed through Twitter

Was USA Today the first to use only Twitter for sources?

USA Today may be the first newspaper to complete a crowdsourced story based entirely on Twitter responses.

Del Jones, writing in the  USA Today Technology section, says he put out this request via a Tweet

Is the USA drifting away from capitalism toward a European-style hybrid of capitalism and socialism?

The resulting story was based entirely on what executives tweeted in response. The story was based on CEOs reached only by Twitter, no phone, no emails, no next day mail.

The result is a story based on tweets from 19 other "top executives." Even the photos uses were downloaded via Twitter.

Do Twitter Executives Read Tweets?

Strikingly, there are no tweets from Twitter executives, even though many retweets alerted the executives the story was in progress. CEO Evan Williams, Chairman Jack Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone chose not to respond to numerous tweets for comment.

Apparently, they were too busy being television celebs. Elisabeth Hasselbeck tweeted that they were on the set ofThe View

"about to head upstairs for show: just hung out with twitter guys(founders)&their wives.love'em,"

Hasselbeck tweeted.

It could be argued that the Twitter executives, with hundreds of thousands of followers, just didn't find the message, but that argument fails because

Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos, had 658,901 followers late Wednesday, and he found time to deliver a one-tweet response.

Of course going public in the Twitterverse leads to lots of reaction from the great unwashed masses, in his story Del Jones, not only quotes the CEO's he targeted but also some other readers.

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