All the news that's useful to print

There was an interest rate announcement today from the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. They voted to keep interest rates at 0.5%.

I know because I read it on Twitter. And -here'd the important bit - that headline is all I had to read.

In most media, interest rate announcements make for an article or a news story. They spin it out, because the format they have available, indeed all they know how to do, requires each story to be just that. A story, with a bit of context and analysis and speculation for what it will mean in the future. So the newspaper journalist will tell us a bit about how Gordon made the MPC politically independent and the TV newsreader will point out what it means for mortgage rates, probably with a talking head (or two, for "balance") discussing whether it's good or bad.

But interest rate announcements are precisely the sort of news where absolutely everything relevant can be conveyed in a sentence.

Yesterday interest rates were X; th MPC has met and either they're still X, they've gone down to Y or they've gone up to Z. At that point the useful portion of the message ends and you have all you could want or need to know about interest rates. 

Of course, stockbrokers and football fans have always known that this is the right approach. Stock tickers just tell you prices: up, down, by how much. Final score reports tell you who won, who lost, by how much. And now, on Twitter, we get all the news that's useful to print - all 140 characters of it, telling us what has happened with links if we care to know more.

(Photo by Adam NFK Smith on Flickr)