For at least a year now I have been hearing tech pundits say, 'Nobody uses RSS anymore. I just get all my news from twitter.' I have never seen this behavior replicated in anybody I know.

I think that it's because heavy twitter usage has other points of appeal to the tech blogger crowd, most of which are, let's be honest, webcocks. The average internet user, or the average hacker, has no interest whatsoever in following 1-5k twitter users, and no real interest in trying to amass that many users themselves. But the 'social media expert' devotes a large amount of his time and energy to gathering followers, subscribers, commenters, etc., so he has some reason to spend an absurd amount of his time in twitter.

A couple things: 1. RSS isn't dying. Whenever you see one site's news stories on another site's page that's using RSS. Plus there are a lot of specialized aggregators that use RSS to work (Techmeme is one I believe)

2. Individual RSS Readers will never die because there will always be a small market for them and they're painfully easy to write. From the programming side every language I know of has a free library available to parse RSS/Atom. So even if Google discontinued Reader (unlikely btw) there would be someone to jump in and fill the void.

"How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?"

Assuming that you follow interesting people who are interested in similar things that you are, it's likely that you could be informed of a news story that matters to you faster than by going through an RSS feed.

The fact that URLs are usually obscured, and the accompanying text on Twitter is usually too brief to efficiently indicate the nature of the link, I generally find Twitter not to be a very effective way of keeping track of things I'm interested in.

And the speed at which I'm informed is usually not important to me. I don't have a professional or personal need to be kept informed about time-critical information. Instead, I'm much more interested in insight, opinion and analysis.

I do agree as a general news medium that will point you to an article, then Twitter works well.

On the other hand, I subscribe to a bunch of photoblogs that would not work well as a Twitter feed. I also subscribe to a bunch of blogs that create their own unique articles of content. That is just not something that can be put into 140 characters.

Generally speaking, I use twitter as a way to come across content not already in my RSS feed. If an article passed through Twitter is from an interesting author, I may add that author to my RSS feed for future articles.

RSS readers are sort of like the big brick circa-1991 mobile phones from Big Lebowski or Wall Street. They are better than the alternatives in a couple of dimensions, but they are not a long term equilibrium.

i actually added twitter as a feed to google reader.