For better and for worse, Twitter has become an essential tool for reporters.
Breaking news often speeds through Twitter faster than any other source. Influencers and thought leaders opine on it hourly, and its 140-character limit forces them to be concise.
Bloggers have increasingly turned to Twitter as a source for short quotes for stories. But the implementation is often messy. Some bloggers copy and paste the text of a tweet, while others take a screenshot and paste it into the story. Sometimes the excerpts are linked back to the source. Sometimes they're not.
Twitter may launch an embedding tool tomorrow that may make it easier and more elegant to connect original tweets to places where they're quoted, the company has hinted in a blog post entitled "Tweets are the new quotes."
Robin Sloan, who works on media partnerships for Twitter, explained how it might be implemented to ReadWriteWeb:
It will be "just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool -- (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media)."