The success of Twitter has had an enormous influence on many new sites, that want to copy the formula: short messages, from all kinds of devices, for a restricted audience. One of the sites that follows this example is Reporting On, a kind of Twitter for journalists, that has been in working in beta phase since last year. And if you register, you'll find the site is getting quite successful particularly among Latin American journalists.
The structure is very similar to Twitter's; we can write up to 140 characters, which most users take advantage of to write news in the form of headlines. Each piece of news can be tagged with many words. In the left column, we can find the most popular tags. We can comment in each others posts as well as reply to them, but we can't follow certain users or filter contents, except for the tags.
Pablo Mancini interviewed Ryan Sholin, who's behind the project, and he points out that Reporting On “is a non profit project financed by Knight News Challenge in order to improve local news, connecting people who don't talk with each other enough”. And he adds: “once the site is working with a healthy amount of applications, I will make the code open source and invite developers and journalists to improve it so they can launch their own versions of the site”.
Also talk about Reporting On: Bloc de Periodista (en español); The Exploding Newsroom; Random Mumblings; and Linchpen. At DigiDave you can find another interview to Sholin.