Daily Telegraph Meets Fail Whale In Case Of The Phantom Twittercrat

It was one of the more entertaining tit-for-tats of the week. The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express all ran stories about the government preparing to appoint a £120k-a-year ‘Twittercrat’ to teach it how to use social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Bebo.

Nice story, except it wasn’t true.

In a rebuttal far better written than the original job ad that sparked the row, the Cabinet Office set out five key inaccuracies in the papers’ reporting (“The job title is wrong. Details of the job description are wrong.” etc).

Could the Cabinet Office use those very social media tools to get its message out?

For more read my latest Journalism.co.uk column: A telling tale of the Twittercrat who wasn’t