One year ago, at the suggestion of my editors at Foreign Policy, I established a Twitter account associated with my blog, Turtle Bay. I obliged the request, but as a longtime newspaper reporter, I was skeptical that having access to a series of 140-character missives would change the way I report the news. Simply put, I was wrong. I've been covering the United Nations for over a decade, but joining Twitter gradually changed the way I cover my beat. Following the latest events in Egypt, I'm reminded that those changes are for the better and worse.

For news junkies, Twitter's speedy and efficient dissemination of information is hard to match. I used to keep an eye on the news wires, but they can't keep up with the mix of content -- news stories from the mainstream press, analytical articles from out-of-the-way places, and specialty blog posts that I'd never have known to look for -- that my Twitter feed curates for me. And I've learned that my followers -- a modest but sophisticated group of nearly 2,000 -- are themselves an able source for my reporting. They've directed me to important public documents, challenged my reporting, and answered oddball questions that Google couldn't. Where else can you put out a request for the correct name of Burma's traditional pink turban and get an answer within five minutes? (It's called a gaung baung.)

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But the medium can be perilous for a reporter. A false tweet can potentially embarrass your employer and your colleagues and harm your reputation. It is all too easy to rocket off some passing observation, or revelation, or recycle an unverified news development from a familiar follower, without subjecting it to the same scrutiny you would a fact in a newspaper story, or a blog post. And in some sense, that's kind of the point. From a reporter's perspective, Twitter is a rumor mill, a high-tech, and often partisan, upgrade on the old office water cooler -- except this version lets your boss, your friends, your critics, and everyone else listen in. But like office gossip and rumors, a lot of it is often dead wrong.

And in a case like that of Egypt -- where the stakes are high, and as governments around the world and young Egyptians on the street try to plan their next move -- mistaken reports have been frequent on my Twitter feed. In recent weeks, I've read tweets claiming incorrectly that President Hosni Mubarak resigned his party leadership and that Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei vowed not to run for the presidency. One blogger posted unverified documents purporting to detail Mubarak's bank deposits -- with a proviso urging others to test their veracity.

The denizens of Twitter, I've discovered, aren't always acting in bad faith. But the medium has a way of allowing old-fashioned mistakes from obscure publications or even traditional news organizations to spread like wildfire. The retweet is an especially ambivalent Twitter function for those who use the service to gather news. Retweeting allows you to forward an interesting tweet or link to your own community of followers while leaving the original Tweeter to vouch for its credibility. The lax norms around retweets can let an incorrect story initially sent out to a handful of people gain exposure to a wider audience of tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions.

"When I retweet something, it does not mean that I believe it's true," Issandr El Amrani, the Arabist blogger warned his readers last month on his blog. "I am just noting that the information is flying around. I feel slightly uncomfortable with that and thus often add TBC (To Be Confimed [sic]) to my retweets."

I'll confess: I have had my own share of screw-ups, inadvertently sharing bad tweets or retweets with my followers only to have to delete them and post corrections or clarifications. Last month, an African newspaper reported that the African Union had appointed Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to participate in a panel charged with leading negotiations aimed at pushing electorally defeated Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo from power. The story got tweeted and retweeted by people I know and follow. Thinking this was a news flash that would interest my readers, I tweeted a version myself.

Within minutes, an anonymous reader -- ironically identified as @fakegbagbo -- flagged my tweet, noting that it was an unverified rumor. Only then did I exercise the caution that I would normally use when reporting a story. A quick review of the coverage showed no confirmation by a reputable news agency, and a little more digging revealed that Mugabe was not, in fact, appointed to the panel. I quickly posted a correction, along with an apology.

The experience provided two important, potentially contradictory, lessons. First, reporters need to use Twitter carefully and deliberately: I needed to slow down, think, and take this more seriously as a news vehicle. I couldn't help but be embarrassed by my mistake. The other was a certain admiration for the self-correcting nature of Twitter -- that errors are quickly spotted and challenged.

Of course, the effectiveness of Twitter as a news medium is highly dependent on the number and quality of followers you manage to attract and maintain. In the early days, when I had a handful of followers, my own tweets had little reach. In April 2010, I experimented by tweeting a modest scoop, the revelation that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be traveling to New York to attend a major U.N. meeting on nuclear disarmament and proliferation. Nobody seemed to notice. I couldn't even detect a single retweet.

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