This week Twitter came in for a bashing as its critics demanded to know what it was for. Its fans found them easy to ignore as they got on with making the joyful discovery for themselves.

It took me a year to “get” Twitter. I failed to see the point of it until a number of high-profile Tweeters arrived to show us all how it was done. They posted blog updates, sought advice on new projects, and cheekily shared ideas that editors had cut from their work. They created a wealth of content and coaxed in a thriving community with which to share it.

One of the best things about Twitter is the sheer transparency of it. Users are encouraged to Tweet under their real names and their words appear for all the world to see. It is even possible to watch newspaper articles come together as their authors ask for contributions and advice. Everyone gets to be in on the process until it ends with a warm and fuzzy “I was there” kind of feeling.

This could be the very thing traditionalists find so off-putting- and perhaps even frightening- about Twitter. New media formats such as blogs and wiki pages come with links and citations, their sources laid bare for all to see. They give readers the chance to say “hang on a minute…” and find out if they were right to harbour that shred of doubt. The concern isn’t that they give more power to the reader, but that they expose the processes involved in creating an article. This is a problem when some of those processes can be very ugly indeed.

Many websites, including this one, accuse journalists of laziness. There are many newspaper readers who enjoy hunting down examples of their laziness, hypocrisy and mendacity, just as  others enjoy finding solutions to the Sudoku puzzles. The hardened sceptic can identify plagiarism, cherry-picked evidence and rehashed press release copy at twenty paces, and Google journalism can be picked apart without a single search or click.

Here’s a bit of Google journalism for you: at the time of writing, the search term “Joogalism”, which the method is often called (according to Google- in the spirit of this experiment I can’t be arsed to check elsewhere) yielded over 2,000 results. The term “Response Source Journalism” yielded just one, which doesn’t even tell you what it is. All this lone result tells you is that Response Source is much less visible.

Response Source was the brainchild of Daryl Willcox, a former journalist who had been very far from lazy. While he and his peers were working hard to find case studies, competition prizes and products to review, he came up with something that was to make their lives much easier. It was a beautifully simple idea, based on two principles: 1. Journalists want stuff, and 2. PRs have stuff they want to give away. Response Source was born, and now media types can use it to request whatever they need while PRs can provide them with all the free spa breaks, eating disorder case studies and dancing midgets their hearts desire.  Everyone’s a winner…

…except perhaps you, dear reader. The problem lies not with the service itself  but with the things journalists feed into it, via the journalist enquiry form. This can be used by any journalist to send anything they like to any PR who subscribes. For journalists the service is free to use and this seems to encourage a scattergun approach, with questions being sent faster than the speed of thought. Not that it matters to the journalists: it’s not Twitter, and the whole world isn’t watching.

With the phone replaced by a cold and impersonal set of text boxes,   the system also lacks a crucial element of human interaction. Journalists feel as if they are feeding their questions to a computer, not to a few thousand sentient beings who might laugh at them. Again, this doesn’t matter: a computer will not answer silly questions, but PRs do not behave like computers, and if you are a PR with clients who need exposure you will reply to anything that’s thrown at you. If, for example, Amy Winehouse catches impetigo and you get a dozen journalists asking you for an impetigo case study, you respond by offering to send them all one, along with a skincare expert, samples of skin creams, puff on how they’re all supposed to work and all the gruesome hi-res images they can stomach. You do not respond by telling them all to get off their arses and walk to a nearby primary school. Similarly, if a journalist asks you where they can find a coat like Carla Bruni’s, you don’t tell them: “Go to a few shops. Have a look at the coats. Any bright purple ones should jump out at you.”

Don’t get me wrong here: I love Response Source. The brilliance/awfulness of the enquiries is the only thing I genuinely miss about PR (I was never much of a champagne drinker) and after  some time away I became curious to find out if the service had changed. Was it still used primarily to find case studies of “plastic surgery gone wrong” for “sensitive and respectful” features?

I decided to carry out some investigative work using Response Source, partly to find some choice examples of enquiries but mainly because the irony was too delicious to resist. Signing up for my free trial, the nice man from Daryl Willcox Publishing assured me that all I had to do was “sit back with a cup of tea and be inundated”.  I wondered if the DWPub staff were getting as weary as the PRs they serve, and on the 9th of February the deluge began.

The week got off to a good start with an enquiry from a female writer looking for “fertility-boosting” products to review. Either she’s the world’s most dedicated journalist or she hadn’t really thought this one through. Another magazine were looking for a woman with a low sex drive and a high-sugar diet. They wanted to take her to a nutritionist where she would be told to eat less sugar. They had trouble finding any takers for this one and had to repeat the request, possibly because any frigid biscuit-munchers would want a proper diagnosis and not a pre-meditated one.

The familiar requests for assorted woo kept pouring in: so far, so inoffensive. This week’s tragic celebrity story had yet to break, and things only took a darker turn when one writer piped up with the news from Kym Marsh on the 12th, pausing to remark that it was very sad before requesting more dead baby case studies than Ms Marsh would want staring up at her in the newsagents.

On Response Source it’s very common for journalists to hover around tragic news events, to the point that their promises to handle issues sensitively look so insincere that they may as well be saying Grace over carrion. One feels this would not be the done thing over on Twitter, in full view of thousands of disapproving users.

Was such laziness, stupidity and ghoulishness really what Daryl Willcox had wanted to come of his brilliant idea? I’m sure it wasn’t: indeed his own blog implies that he’s become a little fed up with the whole thing. In a recent post he even explained how PRs can cut out the middle man and deal with journalists’ enquiries directly, with no need to fork out for his company’s sevrices. Here we come back to Twitter again, and specifically the new services Twilert and TweetBeep. The latter has already received much praise from PRs and now they are even getting themselves organised in anticipation of more free research opportunities.

Like Response Source itself, Twilert and TweetBeep are simple and clever ideas. They are examples of the ways Twitter users have found to enhance their experience of a very stripped-down service. While Response Source has made journalists lazier, Twitter’s limitations have encouraged its users to be more imaginative, leading them to answer the cynics’ question: Twitter is for whatever the users decide it’s for, and perhaps anyone who still can’t see the point should try using their imagination.

Response Source will survive- there is only so much one can request with 140 characters- but it will be interesting to see if journalists take to Twitter. Journalism could become more transparent and writers could become more original, or they could go running back to the old research methods. Whatever happens, the pace of development has been rapid and journalists could do well to keep up.

Incidentally, during the week of my Response Source trial I did not receive one single request for an MMR/autism case study. The future’s looking bright.