Somehow it was bound to happen. The “Twittergate” scandal involving German members of parliament who leaked the result of the president’s re-election is symptomatic of the current craze for Twitter among the world’s politicians, business people and media types.

As the FT reports this morning:

Julia Klöckner, of chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, told her Twitter “followers” that afternoon: “People, you can watch the football in peace. The vote was a success.” Ulrich Kelber, of the SPD party, was even more specific, prematurely uploading the result of the vote-count to his micro-blog: “The count is confirmed: 613 votes. [Horst] Köhler is elected.”

Ms Klöckner later apologised for the “somewhat premature timing” of a message. She has stepped down from her party role in Germany’s parliament.

That comes after various New York Times journalists Twittered about an internal meeting at the paper, which covered topics such as digital business models, irritating Bill Keller, its executive editor.

Lots of organisations are trying to draw up new rules to deal with Twitter, which is not only a real-time tool but crosses the divide between professional and personal use.

I cannot help thinking, that this horse has left the stable. The notions of embargoes, and of confidentiality itself, are inevitably strained by everyone being able to broadcast their thoughts instantly to all those who care to listen.

The text-messaging phenomenon among teenagers has just transferred to the business and professional world, with unruly results.

For some reason, the headline “Why journalists deserve low pay” caught my attention (via Roy Greenslade) and I have read the essay on the topic by Robert Picard.

I think his analysis that the economic value of general news content has diminished because local papers no longer have a distribution monopoly is correct. However, I am not sure about his solution – that such papers should reconfigure themselves as digital providers of specialist information.

The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area. Not only would it make the paper more valuable to readers, but it could sell that coverage to other publications. Similarly, The Dallas Morning News could provide specialized coverage of oil and energy, The Des Moines Register could become the leader in agricultural news; and the Chicago Tribune in airline and aircraft coverage.

It is a nice idea, given that non-distinguishable national and political coverage has very limited economic value on the internet. But turning local, general news sources into global, specialised ones strikes me as quite a stretch, in terms of both branding and execution capacity.

I cannot see why the Hartford Courant, for example, is more likely to become a compelling brand in insurance coverage online than, for example, Lloyd’s List, which now Twitters. On the whole, I agree with the thoughts of Jeff Jarvis – that local news providers should stick to their knitting (and knit harder).