As you likely know, Tiger Woods was in an accident under apparently mysterious circumstances early Friday morning. Predictably, the reports and reactions thereto pertaining varied somewhat in quality and timeliness, and predictably, this has led to paroxysms of futurist glee in some and sullen condemnation by others. Now that the smoke has cleared, we can examine the event, which is certainly worth a little inspection despite its obvious triviality, with a little perspective.
I’m not going to speculate on Woods’ injuries, the cause of the crash, or rumors of fights and affairs. I don’t care, personally. But how the information proliferated makes for interesting dissection. And the fun part is that there’s something for everybody’s agenda! Many will choose to ignore or emphasize unduly one party’s role in this drama, but the fact is that it very neatly exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and so-called new media. I hope you’re sitting comfortably.
First, let’s establish some facts about yesterday’s little fracas. Woods crashed his car at around 2:00AM (all times are Eastern unless otherwise specified). A police report was filed at 2:25AM, and 12 hours later the information was released, probably at 2PM. The Orlando Sentinel reported the information, though it has since revised its story, and the referring links from yesterday now point to one filed early Saturday morning. The original story is nowhere to be found, but it is reasonable to presume that, being a local news outlet, it was the first to report — likely within 15 minutes of the press release being issued. BNO News tweeted at 2:24PM that he was seriously injured, which was a reasonable summary of the police report and likely all that the Sentinel reported. CNN posted a blurb 15 minutes later, at 2:39. Interestingly, Local TV news station WFTV had a team on the scene obtaining obtained from an eyewitness truly awful photos of the accident within what must have been an hour or so, since the photos show it is still night and the car was towed away shortly thereafter. (Update: my mistake. They acquired the photos later in the day.)
Thus far fact. Now, you recall the headline: real time, real discussion, real reporting — choose two. My idea, which that punchy little epigram roughly approximates, is that there is only so much a given source of information can provide, and that if it has certain attributes, it by definition cannot have certain others (with exceptions, of course). Don’t get me wrong, however: each source is valuable, but we must be careful not to assign one qualities it does not possess.
Since this is a blog ostensibly covering tech and Web 2.0, we should probably talk about Twitter first.
Twitter: real-time discussion
MG has already lionized Twitter in this affair, and rightly so. It deserves a pat on the back for doing admirably what it was made to do: propagate a meme as quickly as possible. However, his stronger assertion that Twitter is the real time web’s Walter Cronkite warrants a dissenting response, though I don’t think it is, as some suggested, an insult to the late, great journalist so much as a mischaracterization of Twitter.
Twitter’s mode of operation is a lot like that of fire. A spark is struck elsewhere; in this case (and, let’s be honest, in many cases) it is a piece of celebrity gossip. Whether it catches and spreads, and how fast it does so depend on the conditions. This particular spark landed in a bed of tinder and flared up almost instantly. The fact that the entire story (such as it was then) could be contained in 140 characters helped, of course. Its spread was practically instantaneous.
But that’s where Twitter’s role ends. Consider that local TV news was on the scene quickly enough to take pictures of the accident site before the car was towed, though these were likely not widely reported because at the time, a statement had yet to be released. This kind of coverage is obviously impossible for a decentralized news mechanism like Twitter or Google News. Yet it is the source for a large proportion of the coverage which spreads via those mechanisms. Before a fire can spread, it must be started. And it is very rare that Twitter starts any fires.
A legitimate objection to this idea is that of citizen journalism. Hasn’t Twitter enabled Iranians to broadcast their discontent? Wouldn’t it be handy in an emergency situation, provided it was accessible? To some extent, yes. But in the first case, what reason is there to think, even taking into account how well it was applied in Iran, that Twitter is somehow immune to censorship or outright ban? It’s new, is all, and once someone in charge takes it seriously enough to decide it must be stifled, you can be sure Twitter will have no further use there. An earthquake situation provides a better opportunity for Twitter to be used by itself to report; tweets from around the city saying “gas main broken at 13th and Pine” or the like could certainly be of use to a fire department. It’s questionable, however, whether a hashtag could reliably be established in good time, whether the authorities would be able or willing to sort through the noise, and whether such content as could be found would be capable of being transmitted to those who need it. Still, I’m happy to admit its possible utility in such a situation.
The question, really, is whether one has valuable information to report. If so, then for a moment, one becomes a reporter. And that information is welcome, if it can get where it needs to be. But the truth is that the bulk of users rarely have content to contribute; their role is promotion and discussion. Compare this to a journalist, who makes it his business to either be present at or go immediately to wherever news occurring, then broadcast it via established methods and outlets. More on them later.
Lastly, it’s troubling that what news is spread depends on the population at large. This is more of a personal objection. I have commented that Twitter is the perfect vessel which which to sate the public’s appetite for sensational minutiae. What spreads on Twitter is what’s popular, not what’s important. The last few years have been calamitous for mainstream news integrity for several reasons, but among them is the increasing emphasis on color stories and special interest news, which Twitter seems tailor-made to propagate.
This is also the reason why Twitter is not Walter Cronkite. Cronkite may have worked in real time, and he may have reported unconfirmed information, but the reason he was trusted to do so was because he was the exact opposite of Twitter. His personal discretion and experience made him a trusted individual. Wisdom is not arrived at by consensus, nor the truth, no matter if ten people weigh in or a thousand. No synthesis of opinion or automated sifting of information is a replacement for a discerning, informed, and familiar human being.
Broadcast media: real time reporting
The mainstream (i.e. broadcast) media is supposed to be formed of such human beings. This is, of course, not the case. However, that does not mean the model is broken. The companies comprising it — that’s another matter. The current deplorable state of mainstream news is more, if I may venture a guess, due to a continued financial investment in an obsolete ratings and advertising structure than any real decay of principle. Or rather, the only principle that is really decayed is the networks’ independence from private money. The BBC presents a partial solution in a state-sponsored network, but private bankrolling is simply replaced by public, but that’s not an ideal solution to say the least. I don’t have a better proposal, but I’m happy to point the finger, and our mainstream journalists aren’t doing a hell of a lot of journalism.
That said, the mainstream media were the first on the scene at Woods’ house, and the fact is they will always be the first on the scene. What would Google News or Twitter aggregate if there was no journalist there in the first place? Citizen reporting can only go so far; the idea of a completely decentralized press is hopelessly naive. Access to the public’s information is increasingly important, but there will always be someone, many people in fact, whose job it is to work at something that, if it’s not a local news station, will look a hell of a lot like one.
What will be the source for firsthand news if we don’t have a journalist class? Local news teams, mainstream media at their most mainstream, are the only ones with the experience, the resources, and the staff to cover anything of magnitude. Doubt that? Don’t confuse the death of traditional media distribution with the death of traditional media. The former is happening; the latter is an illusion.
What the mainstream and local media lack is scope and perspective. Imagine a thousand little rooms, each with its own goings-on and a person broadcasting live from each one. They see what’s around them and report it, but their scope is limited. Their first responsibility is to their “room,” their community — hence their journalistic myopia. They know they can’t cover everything in the world, but they don’t have to. Because the world relies upon them when something like this Woods incident occurs in their vicinity. It’s centralized decentralization.
Print and other delayed media: reporting and discussion
What’s left is the news you read the next day in the newspaper — or, really, the next hour on CNN.com or BBC News. These, the most traditional forms of media of all (essentially newsprint or a virtualized version thereof), provide comparatively complete, one-stop reporting and analysis of the event in question. I don’t mean to suggest that the AP, New York Times, or other article outlets are infallible, far from it. But they provide the perspective and context that Twitter (or your favorite social news aggregator) and broadcast news usually lack — and from individuals that have an interest in accurate reporting. Of course, this comes at a cost of timeliness, which may or may not be critical.
Obviously newspapers are having a lot of trouble, and the herd is being thinned, but delayed media (my term), whether distributed as inky tree pulp or otherwise, will continue to have a place in the party. The skills of newspapermen are still required, whether you like it or not, and will be for a long time to come.
Think of the recent story in which President Obama bowed to the Japanese Emperor when visiting that country. Twitter could alert instantly you to the fact that this event occurred, but little more, and only if you’re glued to it. Mainstream media will be the source for the story and video, but is capable of only basic commentary. Delayed media would give you the event, the reactions, the context, and anything more required to make a complete story — but not for at least a few hours.
Which of these methods you use depends on your profession, location, age, and a hundred other factors. Whether such trade-offs as each offers are welcome to you is a personal decision — but it’s unwise to write off a category altogether (as I catch myself doing with Twitter). To use one and not another may forgo or convey an advantage in some situations, but none embodies every aspect of news — content, promptness, and analysis.
Nor will any of the three worlds of information distribution go down without their essence being absorbed, Mega Man-like, into the being of the others. Will Twitter wither without the substantial content of delayed media? Not likely. Will delayed media croak if it doesn’t learn some lessons from Twitter? A little more likely, but that lesson is being learned. Will mainstream and broadcast media go extinct? Not for decades, though they will certainly have some adaptation to do.
The myth of medium
The truth is that there is no old media. And no new media. There is only the present media, its aspect as confused and shifting as any compound creature from legend. I have to quote Hawthorne here:
According to the best accounts which I have been able to obtain, this Chimaera was nearly, if not quite, the ugliest and most poisonous creature, and the strangest and unaccountablest, and the hardest to fight with, and the most difficult to run away from, that ever came out of the earth’s inside. It had a tail like a boa-constrictor; its body was like I do not care what; and it had three separate heads, one of which was a lion’s, the second a goat’s, and the third an abominably great snake’s. And a hot blast of fire came flaming out of each of its three mouths! Being an earthly monster, I doubt whether it had any wings; but, wings or no, it ran like a goat and a lion, and wriggled along like a serpent, and thus contrived to make about as much speed as all the three together.
That sounds about right! Now, if you can stomach the unbearable pretension of likening of the complex media world to a monster (be grateful I didn’t quote Lovecraft), you can see that it is unlikely that one head will just up and consume the other, though they may quarrel and gnaw on one another frequently. One significant difference: while the creature Hawthorne described combines the speed of all three, the present media finds itself limited by its own strengths. There is no popular discussion that does not cause sensationalism, for instance, and there is no expert inspection that does not cause delay. The nature of the beast, however, does change over time, and you may safely lay your bets on Twitter (social media in general, really — any “real time discussion”) being an important (but limited) part of it.
Finally: blogs are the real wild card here. The issue is that they qualify for each category but aren’t fundamentally limited to any — which makes them both versatile and unreliable. This blog, for example, has pieces that fall under every category: tweet-like posts about some Apple rumor, rehashes of press releases, and interminable editorials like the one you’re just about to finish. Yes, the credibility (and readability) of the blogosphere is still questioned, puzzlingly enough, but who knows — the Chimaera may grow a fourth head yet.
[Note: For anyone confused: I chose the three outlets shown in the top diagram as visible representatives, and am not necessarily talking specifically about each one; you'll notice that there are shots from MSNBC, Fox News, and the newsroom photograph is of the Daily Telegraph.]
No doubt, Twitter will generally be the first to disclose an event as it happens, such as an earthquake, accident, and the like. Reason is simple. Hundreds of millions of people can use Twitter to report, using their mobile phones or laptop / computer. In comparison, TV / newspapers have limited number of reporters.
Once a story is known through Twitter or otherwise, other media will give you more details (vis-a-vis a 140-character tweet); so you shift to news channels and may be print media on the next day. Print media will of course become extinct after some years.
So, the real two sources would be: Twitter or Twitter-like websites; and, TV media.
This is the reasonable response I was waiting for. Twitter is useful, but it is not Walter Cronkite. Keep the evangelism to the pulpits, please.
Person to person it may vary, but I’ll choose real discussion and reporting over real time. After all, while Cronkite did report unconfirmed information during the Kennedy assassination, he always made sure to note it was not confirmed. And the most famous moment wasn’t the early reports, but this at 2:38 pm EST: “From Dallas, Texas, a flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Time.”
You don’t need to choose 2 of the three. You can get all of them by using services like Yauba that integrates “real time” with other sources, even for topics like Tiger Woods
http://www.yauba.com/?target=all&plg=y&q=Tiger+Woods
Dude, don’t reply to me with a misunderstanding of the article just so you can promote your terrible aggregator on the top of the page. Dick.
Oneriot is even better that Yauba.
Look at this http://www.oneriot.com/search?q=tiger+woods&st=web&ot=
Dude oneriot is even worse. Hell, I’d take Yauba over Oneriot anyday.
Kim, stop spamming Techcrunch on behalf of Oneriot.
I give up.
I feel your pain, kyle. Your original comment was great. And both of those dudes are clearly dicks.
But are you aware of NewJahJah.com? It uses proprietary technology to simultaneously aggregate expert opinion, real-time discussion, and it’s all printed on newspaper in real time, and delivered to your hours every 5 minutes by a fleet of twitter-connected vans. I think you should really check it out.
hahaha kyle i think the first commenter actually might have put that link there as a good faith recommendation whereas the second one was more of a get your goat kind of reply.
you know about your decision to pick one over the other? one thing i was thinking about when i was reading mg’s two pieces and the comments with them is that in this time and age, like what devin is pointing out, we don’t have to pick one or the other above one form. we are all consumers. one of the things that srurpised me were the amount of people saying that they would rather have reliable news instead of something that satifies the need for right here right now. i would think i’m a middle type of consumer in that i need to know everything, but i do that in my own time. also another thing i picked up which is illustrated here with devin’s screenshot of the tweet stream, is that what is news to one person is not news to another.
well this harold guy is obviously worse than the other two.
Harold, you win an Internet.
And now, in response to the actual original comment, I have to agree with you: real reporting and discussion is almost always better than real time. There are very few situations when it’s necessary to hear what’s happening the very second it occurs.
I didn’t hear about Tiger Woods’ accident until several hours after it had happened, nor did I know about the Fort Hood incident until a day later, and you know, I don’t feel unfulfilled or dissatisfied at all.
Premise:”They know they can’t cover everything in the world, but they don’t have to. Because the world relies upon them when something like this Woods incident occurs in their vicinity. It’s centralized decentralization.”
Final Note: Yes, the credibility (and readability) of the blogosphere is still questioned, puzzlingly enough, but who knows — the Chimaera may grow a fourth head yet.
I think you already answered your premise with your conclusion – It doesn’t really matter now on how credible blogs are that goes the same way for social media as long as they give upright information fast… Would the Majority ever care?
Did Twitter Saves the day for TIger Woods? Video: http://bit.ly/tiger-woods-car-crash-good-condition-now
I think there is a use for real-time but I see it as being useful for more mundane reasons like traffic and weather (which is already reported real-time by traditional news outlets).
I personally have never understood the fervent passion with which news outlets (even this blog) claim to be the “first” to report a story.
For most news stories (and this is easily 99% of them), it really doesn’t matter if I get to hear it within minutes of it happening, or within hours.
Does it really matter if I get to know in real time how Tiger Woods got injured? Would it make any different whatsoever to my life if I read it in the paper tomorrow?
Being first is important in case of terror strikes, disasters, or election/sports results. Beyond that, regular news has no direct impact on the audience to be so time-sensitive.
President Obama released a statement with the Chinese? Great! I can read about it tomorrow or the day after. The Indian PM is visiting America? Amazing, but this news story can wait.
In other words, we have to stop the fetishism of news.
Puranjay, your comment is refreshing.
I thought i was alone to think this way.
I don’t feel smarter to get all that infos on real times, but if you tell me my plane is late on real time, this is valuable for me, my life and my family;
I think im gonna launch that start up to clean real time infos !
i know. some other commenters picked this up in the conkrite piece and also the original why twitter wins piece. i mean what is this mindless fucken obsession with being first at everything and why do we always have to win everything. it doesn’t make one difference to me, unless i have a vested interest, to know that tiger woods was in an accident. give me a break. i mean i’m not saying i don’t altogether not care, but in the realm of news i had to question if it was really news. i guess i have an “is this important” scale that i measure things by.
MG Siegler: Undoubtedly by now you’ve heard about Tiger Woods’ car crash.
Me: Well, NOW I have.
ZOMG!! MGS is the next twitter is the next Walter Cronkite!!
This was exactly my point when commenting on MG’s article. Who really has a need to know everything the instant it happens? The people who do (investors, emergency response etc) will have more official and reliable sources of information.
The rest of us should, hopefully, be engrossed in our own lives to really care what’s happening right now.
Excellent article. One of the best and most sober on this topic I’ve read.
Pleased to see a fairly sensible discussion of this. I thought MG’s article was as ridiculous as the comments Arrington has made about new and old media. The advantage old media has is the time and effort and resources it puts into research and accuracy. Blogs and Twitter have their place, but fundamentally they tend to deal in a level of gossip and poorly researched analysis that simply would not be acceptable at, for example, the NYT.
I think people sometimes forget that we don’t read old media because we want to find out what people are saying has happened. We read it because we want to know what has happened. Sure, information wants to be free, yada yada yada, but the verification of information and the standards of good reportage require a great deal of labour-hours. For news about things that actually matter (eg, not Tiger Woods crashing his car) I will always choose the NYT etc etc because there’s simply a much higher standard of reporting. It isn’t idle gossip, which the blogosphere often seems to descend into.
Why do all the ‘crunch’ sites continuously use CNN as the comparison? They are in FOURTH PLACE of all the cable news networks! They are irrelevant!
I think perhaps it might be because CNN is the LEAST BIASED of any of the major cable news networks? Actual, unbiased reporting might be less popular nowadays in the era of Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Keith Olbermann, but all I watch is CNN, because I prefer to form my own opinions from the facts, and not let any “talking heads” tell me what to think or what to do.
CNN certainly didn’t cover Sarah Palin in a very “unbiased” kind of way. Seems to me CNN knew exactly how they felt about her when they were unleashing their “talking heads” to rip her apart.
an excellent post Devin and like the other commenters it is nice to see a balanced viewpoint when it comes to the often rabid belief that Twitter is going to be our next great deliverer of news.
Mark Dykeman wrote an great post at SiliconAngle that dovetails nicely with what you have written here and is a worthy read as well
http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/11/29/why-mg-siegler-is-both-wrong-and-right-about-twitter-the-real-time-web-and-walter-cronkite/
One aspect you don’t mention is liability. In electronic and print media you always have someone to blame them if they transmit false news. People may get prosecuted if it’s serious enough. Not so with “social” media, especially twitter.
If you’ve played that “broken telephone” game as a kid, you know that information is monstrously distorted when too many people are involved in the news chain, as is the case with twitter. In the “social” media (which is really anarchic media) no one is liable. The backlash from transmitting false news rarely reaches the original liar, because it is diffused and absorbed among the thousands of retweeters.
Twitter (or facebook, or blogs, or anything that is available) is only useful in the few exceptional cases in the world , like Iran, where “traditional” media cannot report. For the rest of the world, twitter is just a fun game.
Mr. Coldewey do you have anything to disclose? Stocks, equity, or personal relationships with CNN, print newspapers, etc. Any media company that purchased your photographs?
P.S. Print is dead, talking it up won’t bring it back. Ask any local horse maker.
P.S.S. TV news is so rife with conflicts of interest ( never run bad PR stories on advertisers ) and addicted to Nielsen ratings during sweeps they are all an utter farce.
that doesn’t make any sense. “print is dead”…you mean print on paper or do you mean print that has then been, what did devin say, vertualized?
i think the form of news delivery might be dead but that doesn’t mean news istelf is dead, nor is consumtion and neither will story telling/retelling. sometimes i think the world journalism isn’t an all encompassing word that can be used to describe where news reporting is going, but sometimes i really do think that some people don’t understand the word and use it to obfuscate what is really being done. i don’t understand why there needs to be this tension between so called journalists of the old media form and bloggers of the new media form. if you do a good and reliable job you will have readers.
CNN, The NY Times, MSNBC in an article about news – go figure.
Well, Left-wing news, to be fair.
CNN reports the news??? I thought it was the conservative arm of US magazine.
CNN conservative ? By what standard ? HuffingtonPost, Moveon.org, MSNBC, BBC ? HAH !!
Oh, almost Forgot to include the NYT’s as the newpaper of choice of people who absolutely hate conservatives and like their news source to reinforce their self-affirmations.
There’s one thing you’ve got slightly wrong in the article – TV news did not “go to the scene” at 3am – no one did – the local station obtained those photos from a witness AFTER the story broke at 2pm – 12 hours after the accident happened.
If TV news had gone to the scene at 3am, the story would have broke overnight, rather than at 5am.
Also, since there weren’t any witnesses to tweet about the accident, it didn’t break virally, so the social media aspect of this story is largely related to the spread of the news – rather than commentary from those watching or involved as a running dialog, which is where twitter really shines.
If I were Ms. Nordegren and a neighbor stood there tweeting about the crash as Tiger is laying unconscious on the ground, I think I’d use that golf club to pulp them.
+1
:D
the story wouldn’t have broke overnight. the story would have been kept for the morning news segment of 5 am or whenever their morning prime time is, so that they can spread the news among their viewiers at the most optimal time.
also the local news might have broke this first at 3 am but it probably wouldn’t spread until more people are awake and active.
my biggest thing with mg’s post about twitter being the winner or whatever that healine was, was that i knew that there had to be a single point of existance for this story. where tiger woods lives is not the boonies. so i believed that someone, whether it was a civilian or an employee of the police force, hospital, etc…would have sold this story for a pretty penny to something like tmz. that’s what i was mostly surprised about. this story originated somewhere first and it wasn’t twitter. i saw it on cnn earlier that day and then i’m online a couple hours later and see it on tc. i wasn’t surprised but i was kinda laughing at the adamant statement of bno breaking the news first. yeah maybe they did online, or on twitter, but i was sure that this story broke somewhere else and definately before friday afternoon. and obviously once the story broke their were all kinds of retardation of the facts. i wasn’t particualrly happy with tiger’s spokesperson and how they broke this news, but i think they did the best they could in that situation and tried to control the release as well as the break as much as possible considering that they made themselves available for comment and a real live question period. man that pr lady did looked mighty pissed.
Thanks Steve, I thought that might be the case but didn’t double check before I published. Still, whether they took them or not, they were the “on the ground” people there who were able to obtain critical information through their local sources. I’ve corrected that in the article.
Excellent post. Spot on.
It might be worth noting that not all Twitterers are created equal, not all blogs are created equal just as not all traditional media are either Washington Post or a tabloid.
We trust the news based on the source – I know which of my social network members bring me gossip and which ones bring me facts.
Another thing to note is that news ‘gathers’ OUR stories – they don’t come out of thin air. If there’s news to report, a human being is behind it. Maybe they are tweeting, maybe they are blogging or maybe they are being filmed by a tradmed film crew. Or maybe both.
Look to your sources, are they reliable? Look to the source – can you get first hand knowledge from someone on the scene? We are all learning to think like journalists. And where things are today are not where they will be tomorrow….
Fantastic post; excellent analysis.
I can see the blogosphere splitting into several mini-media: blogs that excel at speed, others at reporting, and still others at discussion. But that will only succeed in the realms where there’s a healthy ecology thereof.
CNN real reporting? I think something is wrong with your diagram. No one is watching CNN these days. Remember how it would not carry news of the Iranian election protests? Now that was real reporting by CNN
There’s no big mystery to unravel, here.
1. You can sue CNN and the NY Times for big cash, when they say something nasty and wrong about you.
2. Good luck doing that with the average Twitter user.
1 + 2 = a glut of irresponsible ‘reporting,’ which will frequently be wrong but will, now and again, be right.
Eh. I’d rather just read something solid.
hey devin, thanks for the write up. now your comment in mg’s article about wisdom not being crowdsourced makes sense. i left a comment about how we needed a voice writing something different to mg’s cronkite comparison and i’m glad you came through this holiday weekend. do you think that the right terminology isn’t being used to describe certain types of news forms or that people are confusing different types of news platforms/protals? i think it was phreddy tran who pointed it out most accurately in the other post about how twitter isn’t news. it’s a form of news delivery, yes, and even then how are we to know and validate that bno twitter account over another source we trust more? granted cnn has been watering down their news coverage for many years now since they want more/better ratings, but i think the way they went about this whole tiger incident wasn’t out of their usual way of dealing with current events. if i never see another balloon boy incident it will only be too soon.
What there are no twitterer chasing ambulances at 2:00am? Guess we have to pay somebody for doing that :-).
There seems to be a problem with your analysis, in they way that you present it. News is not on a time line, sequence. Its development occurs in parallel. Or more like a complex system.
Result: There is more than one truth out there. Truth is what you believe not necessary a mathematical fact.
The old media assumes they are the only provider of truth, but now I can read many versions of truth and make up my own version.
The delayed media should partly automate their process. If they get it out 5h late, I have consumed already many different versions and have made up my mind. Their analysis is just to slow, that’s why aggregators are so dangerous to them.
It’s a parallel/complex world out there, they a have to bake that into their business model.
You know, I could be the first on the scene for something newsworthy. And I could post it on Twitter as it unfolds or immediately afterward. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the world will know about it. If people aren’t monitoring my tweets, or if they don’t happen to see it while watching the main Twitter stream or looking for a key word, how is anyone going to know? How do you search for news events that you don’t know are unfolding and that are being posted in places you don’t usually check?
Posting first, but not having a news outlet where people normally check, isn’t going to going to get my comments out to the world first.
Twitter without people to pick up on stories is no more useful than if I publish a newspaper that no one reads.
@ronald emergency services including ambulances are tweeting now. Michael Jackson’s death was reported by staff – an orderly?- at the hospital on his arrival, to a blog. So no, I guess we don’t need to pay anyone to chase ambulances :)
Interesting how you have Twitter at the top of the period.
There is zero barriers to entry for any dick and jane to Twitter.
Twitter shouldn’t be in the same breadth as CNN for quality news.
I call this Coldewey’s Uncertainty Principal (CUP). Like Heisenberg, only for media.
For the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, see http://bit.ly/8wPqtR
i agree- there’s only so much legitimacy with twitter- i look at it as the talking head, man on the street, citizen journalist, which just may be the first person on the scene. its in the story position then evolves as the story does…
i think the modern day story should be a hybrid- because you have information coming from so many different directions. you also need to use all those sources when telling the story. if not, you’re alienating possible audiences and information that live on multiple platforms.
Excellent article Devin, and very refreshing. After MG’s article I was about ready to give up on TechCrunch, but this adds some much needed perspective and thought on the discussion.
I completely agree. There is no “old media” in the sense that it’s outdated, just that there have been developments (new media) that have joined it, not replaced it.
I think that it depends completely on the end user as to which medium is used. My father, for instance, would never dream of using Twitter to keep up to date with news – that’s what the TV’s for. Whereas my son hates TV and I’ve never seen him with a newspaper, so gets all of his information from the web based news publications. I use a combination of everything. I think there will always be a place for delayed media as well as real time.
We are definitely in the age of “News Entertainment”.
The “Entertainment” aspect takes precedent over the “News” aspect since everyone is trying to break through the noise and increase their followers, ratings, views, etc. On Twitter you’re competing with the “I just went potty” tweets, while CNN is competing with ESPN, Discovery, etc.
Reminds me of something I say all the time:
“Good, fast, cheap; pick any two”.
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Great article! Easily one of the best pieces I’ve read on TC. I’m glad this topic was broached since I did have an issue regarding Twitter and the supposed death of traditional media. Also, it was done in an insightful and fair manner, as opposed to the apparent bias on this topic by some of the other public voices of Web 2.0.
The only thing I would say is that Twitter, to me, is more medium than source (or actual news). At least broadcast news and traditional media have reporters, experts and do actual work in creating the news. Linking to an article does not a reporter make. If anything, it’s just an electronic form of people spreading word/gossip and also being able to link to a news authority.
Case in point: I’d trust the cnn or reputable news source’s twitter feed as opposed to a random person’s twitter feed when it comes to the authenticity and accuracy of news. More proof that twitter is just another form of medium (just as TV is for broadcast news and paper is for print media).
Perhaps in part 2 of this article you could also speak to how traditional media is using new media. For example, NYTimes will often use the Lede blog when following any sort of real time event (eg. the Iran protests, shooting at Ft. Hood, etc.).
Great article Devin, the only point I’d be curious to hear you elaborate on is this:
“What spreads on Twitter is what’s popular, not what’s important”
Part of the change of media is the editorial and selection process. While I agree that popularity on Twitter doesn’t directly imply importance, we need to be careful here. Importance (in the more traditional sense) is a very subjective metric. In contrast, traditional reporting is generally less biased and subjective (or at least it should be). Does the experience and education of a room of editors have a better understanding of importance than say, 500,000 tweets?
My open question then becomes, who decides what is important?
Continued: Just noticed your recent comment here
“… I thought that might be the case but didn’t double check before I published.”
Was this comment intentionally a conversation starter? It’s innocence sits so beautifully well with the theme of your post, because if you were CNN and had said that, you’d have been fired! :)
Heh, no, the information just wasn’t available when I was drafting the post. WFTV had watermarked the images so I assumed they took them. I assumed wrong, apparently!
I’d hazard a guess that what’s important would be major events that would have the potential to change society or the arrangement of the world as we know it, history-making events like 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the Iranian election protests, or Congressional runoffs. Compare that with what you see on E! Network: “TODAY RICHARD HEENEY (if I got Mr. Balloon Boy’s name right) WALKED STRAIGHT FROM HIS TRUCK TO HIS HOUSE WITHOUT TALKING TO REPORTERS!!!! OMFG!!!” I wish I was exaggerating but that’s actually the kind of story entertainment “news” networks like to focus on because there’s usually not much else to talk about day-to-day! And yet if we’re to trust only in Twitter counts that’s the kind of news story that’s most important in modern America…
Does the experience and education of a room of editors have a better understanding of importance than say, 500,000 tweets?
My open question then becomes, who decides what is important?
Definitely an important question, and of course I wanted to dilate a bit on that but the article was already getting too long. Also, it’s pretty subjective what is important, but I’d say that being informed and having a global perspective are essential in determining what is important. I’m not saying people on Twitter fundamentally don’t have that, but there’s no need for them to have it. In the case of newspapers and so on, there is, and it is enforced rigorously.
At any rate, it’s a question for the times, isn’t it? What determines importance? I’m afraid that’s out of my jurisdiction, I’m just a tech blogger :)
Anybody have any recommendation for further reading on this topic??
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