It's a tiny window into people's lives, the thoughts of celebrities, breaking news and updates ranging from the mundane, to the extraordinary.

It's Twitter, and I love it. My romance with this stream of short bulletins is both professional and personal, but more and more I'm finding this basic piece of social networking a remarkable tool for journalism.

Twitter is stupidly simple.

You sign up for a (free) account, give yourself a username and start to follow people you think might interest you and watch their updates which are short bursts of information in 140 characters or less.

Most people follow their favourite celebrities, journalists, family and friends, sit back, read and, sometimes, comment on what ever they have to say. It's a great way of finding out what is happening right now.

Primarily I follow those who interest me – and they are the good citizens of Leicester and Leicestershire.

This might sound a bit boring when I could be watching Gary Lineker remind Piers Morgan he'd never played in a World Cup, or viewing Stephen Fry's eye on the world or reading how Lady GaGa is just "45 minutes from going on stage", but when I signed up for Twitter, first and foremost I did so as a Leicester Mercury journalist.

In the back of my mind I had the words a former editor gave me a few years ago.

He said: "News is people. No people means no news."

I thought it would be a great way to see what Leicester people are up to, get to know them, and use them as a source of news and opinion.

I'm nearly two years into my life with Twitter and the people I follow are exactly that – and more.

And it's not just me feeding off the things they say, they too see me as someone who can reliably tell them what is happening. I often use my tweets to promote the work of the Leicester Mercury, and in doing so remind readers and 'tweeters' that I work for the number one source of news in Leicestershire.

I also tweet my personal opinions on there too, what I'm up to, what I've just done at the gym or pictures of my twins, some of it, I'm sure is mundane – but it can be the spark of a good conversation.

Many of the Mercury journalists are on Twitter, tweeting about their lives, the stories they are writing, talking to readers, making new contacts and finding things out, in some cases, information they may never have discovered – and you can find all their usernames on page 15 of the Leicester Mercury everyday.

Sometimes I wonder how reporters operated before the internet – but actually, I'm old enough to remember.

When I trained as a journalist, I had a notepad, pen and a contacts book to work with.

If I wanted to get a story back to hit a deadline I phoned it over to a copytaker.

If I wanted to check something, I went to the library and hoped they had a relevant book. The year? 1997.

The internet, at that time, was only just taking off and not in widespread use in our industry like it is now.

It is widely accepted that the internet is a wonderful tool for everyone working in journalism, but Twitter seems to have taken it to another level.

We can find contacts, break stories, express opinions – our own, not the newspaper's – receive information from people who want to get involved in our stories and generally put ourselves at the heart of what is happening.

This is another thing which puts the Leicester Mercury at the heart of what is happening in Leicestershire.

We remain the number one source of news in our area and Twitter enables us to reinforce that message.

Someone 'tweeted' me recently to accuse me of killing newspapers with my updates. He suggested that by giving out snippets of what the Leicester Mercury was working on, we would be losing sales.

What was interesting is that I didn't have to reply. Several Mercury readers joined the conversation. Examples of the things they said to the 'tweeter' were: "If you think we wouldn't buy tomorrow's Mercury because of those tweets you are wrong." And: "It makes us want to buy the paper more if we know they've got that story."

The story in question was, incidentally, Leicester City bringing in a striker from Aston Villa. Sky Sports News were already running it. Why would I not let our readers know that we had it too? It was just a way of saying to our readers that the Leicester Mercurywould be carrying a lead story on it. What was interesting to me also was despite a major news organisation like Sky Sports News running the story, many people would not believe City were signing Nathan Delfouneso until someone at the Mercury had said it.

It reassured me that using Twitter to promote our work is the right thing to do.

So that's us promoting our stories out to you.

But what about bringing them in? Twitter is very good for that, too.

A recent example I can give is that of the death of the takeaway owner in Linton Street, Evington. On the Sunday night in question, someone had tweeted a photograph of police squad cars and a forensic unit van in the area.

This is more than enough information for us to want to investigate.

From there, we discovered that there had been a suspected murder, information we immediately passed back to readers via Twitter, and then broke the story a few hours later on our front page.

This is something we may not have found out about for several hours had it not been posted by a reader on Twitter.

We also found eye-witness accounts we could check out and people willing to give us pictures of the incident – all useful information that we published in the main newspaper.

It takes far more than 140 characters to create a front page lead story – but it's a great place to start.

To that end, Twitter has become a very useful tool for our work at the Leicester Mercury. Right now it's up there with the pad, pen and contacts book.

It also gives our readers a tiny window into our journalists' lives, their thoughts, their news and their updates which genuinely do range from the mundane, to the extraordinary.