[pavel_lishin]

"How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?"

Assuming that you follow interesting people who are interested in similar things that you are, it's likely that you could be informed of a news story that matters to you faster than by going through an RSS feed.

[barrkel]

The fact that URLs are usually obscured, and the accompanying text on Twitter is usually too brief to efficiently indicate the nature of the link, I generally find Twitter not to be a very effective way of keeping track of things I'm interested in.

And the speed at which I'm informed is usually not important to me. I don't have a professional or personal need to be kept informed about time-critical information. Instead, I'm much more interested in insight, opinion and analysis.

[etm117]

I do agree as a general news medium that will point you to an article, then Twitter works well.

On the other hand, I subscribe to a bunch of photoblogs that would not work well as a Twitter feed. I also subscribe to a bunch of blogs that create their own unique articles of content. That is just not something that can be put into 140 characters.

Generally speaking, I use twitter as a way to come across content not already in my RSS feed. If an article passed through Twitter is from an interesting author, I may add that author to my RSS feed for future articles.