Welcome Ruth Barnett, the Sky News Twitter correspondent

Check out Mike Butcher’s post over at TechCrunch UK. Fascinating. Sky News have appointed a Twitter correspondent to hunt for news stories across the service — and, I assume, across other mediums such as Facebook and so on.

The correspondent is named Ruth Barnett. I trust she is equipped with a shit-hot array of 30″ screens and a decent internet connection, along with a heck of a lot of iPhones, Blackberries and so on (for when she’s on the go). She’ll need the same equipment at home too. Twitter doesn’t switch off at 5pm. Indeed I reckon they’ll need a team of people working under Ruth.

You can follow Ruth here.

One assumes that if you’ve got a juicy news story, or if you’ve just been in a train crash (or the like), you can Tweet Ruth and within seconds you’ll be taken live.

I wonder who owns the RuthBarnett Twitter account? Sky or Ruth? If Ruth leaves, does Sky lose the huge network of people she’s about to create?

As ever, Mike poses issues that get my brain ticking away:

But it also raises interesting issues. The mainstream news media is watching us on Twitter. We in turn are watching them. But unlike the old days, you can block people on Twitter. Will Twitter users start to block journalists they don’t want to be followed by? Will news outlets start to not declare their Twitter profiles, or order to avoid this?

How long before someone finds a derelict airplane in someone’s back yard and snaps a TwitPic with a funny quote — and finds the whole of the world’s mainstream media knocking at their virtual front door wanting to know where to send the camera team? 😉

As per Mike’s comments, I too welcome Sky News to the Twittersphere. Good to see the innovation.