Using Twitter to correct and shape government news stories

The White House has begun using Twitter as a tool to correct journalistic mistakes and understand the reaction of journalists to news stories, as reported in the article, W.H. messaging in 140 characters.

Over the past few months, particularly during and following the change in Federal Liberal leadership, I've been finding some of the commentary published on Twitter by Australian journalist very useful in providing insight into how they plan to spin stories.

This tempo is likely to increase this year with the various elections that will be taking place.

Given there's now over 500 Australian journalists and news commentators using Twitter (according to the Earley Edition), I wonder how soon we'll see politicians and government departments using Twitter to release or correct news stories.

Then again, given some of the tweets from certain politicians, viewable over in TweetMP, maybe they are doing it already.