Can't get an interview with Kanye West? Don't worry - that's what Twitter is for!

I remember watching the film 'Almost Famous' and thinking to myself, "wouldn't it be cool to be a music journalist?" Who wouldn't want to get exclusive interviews with music's demigods, and maybe even follow them on the road to see what rock stars are like in private?

The exclusivity of that kind of access to rock stars is the reason I think music journalism has been traditionally glamorized by the public. But I think this kind of journalism is at risk of being cheapened by the advent of social media.

The reality is that social media allows entertainers, athletes and even politicians to bypass reporters and talk directly to the public. I hate to say this because it could diminish the middle man role traditional media plays.

If you just want information without insight or depth, then who needs a reporter when a celebrity such as Kanye West can speak directly to his fans through his Twitter account? And speaking of Kanye, I want to show why I think he's a good case study of how social media, Twitter in particular, has changed the way the media covers celebrities.

Kanye is a guy who has been much maligned in the media for being an egomaniac and overall asshole - especially after he interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Why wouldn't he feel the need to bypass the horde of reporters to get to his fan base? Guess what, after Kanye's self imposed exile, he made a comeback of sorts by suddenly appearing on Twitter.

And what did the media do? In our celebrity obsessed culture, the media covered his foray into Twitter like real news. This past July, a google search for Kanye West would have turned up headlines like this one from Rolling Stone Magazine, "Kanye West Joins Twitter, Debuts New Song".

Even as I write this, there's a story about Kanye West that's based entirely on what he wrote on Twitter. He's currently pissed off because one of his new songs was leaked on the internet. Did he issue a press statement saying this? Nope...he just tweeted and reached his 1-million plus followers instantly. Those tweets were then re-purposed by traditional media into a news story.

Journalists pride themselves on their sources and the answers they can get from them. I feel that kind of gets cheapened with celebrity Twitter accounts. How enterprising is a piece of work if it's quoting bite sized 140-character tweets that more than a million people have seen already? I want a reporter to get me what I can't get myself. I don't really need a reporter who's only going to quote a celebrity's tweets - I can do that myself by signing up for a Twitter account.

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