Puffbox

Sky News is republishing Twitter updates from someone called Christine Brogan, a British backpacker in Cancun as the hurricane hits. Doing some quick research (ie Facebook), it looks like she’s just a mate of someone in the newsroom. Which makes me wonder, purely hypothetically… if a news organisation spotted someone tweeting about a news event, is it ethical (or indeed sensible?) for them to republish the stream on their own pages? Twitter says it ‘encourage(s) users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms’, and I don’t see any copyright statement on the typical Twitter page.