This post was mentioned on Twitter by jasonwhat: News station has hilarious Twitter FAIL with billboard campaign. Why it doesn’t matter. A lesson for nonprofits. http://bit.ly/6Wf0OI...

Also, I think your two examples add weight to my point: those Twitter FAILS you mention caused a temporary black eye, but no lasting impact. Nobody decides to trust the papers mentioned based on those Twitter incidences. In other words, their brands didn't suffer.

Right wing UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph decided they'd be cutting edge in their coverage of the UK Budget statement by including a Twitterfall on their homepage picking up anything hastagged #budget. People realised pretty soon they could destroy this with some very funny comments appearing on the Telegraph website's homepage see this in a rival paper http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/apr/20...

The other one involved another right wing UK newspaper the Daily Mail who had a poll on their website asking “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?” with a yes or no answer. This is the sort of nonsense the Mail frequently publishes but someone on Twitter pretty soon noticed this was on their site and everyone started retweeting and responding to scupper the poll with the result that 80% of people responding said gipsies should be allowed to “jump the queue”
See screenshot here:
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/06/2...

I agree you need to open things up and let the crowd in but also mainstream media organisations who don't necessarily have a guerilla approach to campaigning need to get smart because the Twitter crowd has enough bright and sarcastic people to exploit weaknesses very very quickly. In my experience of opening things up the crowd is also great at self-regulating those who want to destroy what is good.