The speed of news, are you keeping up?
I have been telling people how much I love newspapers because the are a handy archive of the stuff I read online yesterday.
I have pretty much grown up in the age of the news being on TV every night. This news was probably a day or two old by the time most people heard it.
Along came the internet and you could get your news 12-18 hours later.
Then blogs entered the picture and your news has only a few hours old. Sweet!
Twitter is here now and it seems as if news is old after about 15 minutes. A couple times a day I check in at TwitScoop.com and a lot of times you can see live news happening right before your eyes.
When we have an earthquake down here in SoCal, I can check Twitter and I know how big it was, where it was centered and if my friends and family are okay long before the TV news can even get a camera in front of a reporter.
This blog post is old news…
The internet is great because the censorship by the Big 3 is harder to mask. They may bring in their "Fairness Doctorine" laws, but the free speech of the internet is here to stay.
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I'm really trying to get on board with this concept. I agree at how easy and fast it is to get facts instantly now. But I still hold on to the notion that we need good editors who we trust to help us filter through all of the noise. Sometimes newspapers have stories that are useful to me but I would have never gone out and searched for that topic. Some blogs are great for that, but many aren't anywhere near the level of depth or validity from a good journalist.
For instance, in your example, you know an earthquake happened, so you know to go check on how big it was. But I sometimes find a lot of value in the stories below the fold – organizations doing cool new stuff, charities trying new approaches, etc. – that I would have never thought about and never seen from the twitterers I follow. I guess instead of thinking of "my morning paper", I have to convert to "my tweetie, my blogs, my news sites, my digg, my fail blog (the most important one!), and my daily show" But even then, I don't feel like the quick summary level sound bites add up to the depth I could get from a well researched and written article in a newspaper (and I hate reading those online because they are too long! haha).
I'm not fighting it because I know it is here and I want to embrace it. But it doesn't seem very straight forward on how to make the transition.
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@eric :: I agree, I hope we still find a way to keep 'real journalists' around. We need them and their reports.
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