Old-Media Fail

This is a thought I had: Wow. This is a completely new way to get news and information. Sure, you could say it lacks in context and it traffics in guesswork -- but everything's on the table, and it's happening right now.

I had that thought in 1991, as I watched stuff blowing-up and listened to Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett broadcasting live from Baghdad (and often under a table, if memory serves) on CNN.

In a perfect world, I'd be even more of a luddite than I am. I mourn the loss of newspapers (though not always what newspapers have become in their most recent incarnations). I tolerate and sometimes appreciate public radio on my drive in to work (what can I say? my cassette player's busted). More nights than not, I try to watch one of the Network newscasts that occasionally manage to interrupt a barrage of pharmaceutical ads. And, yeah, I even once found cable news fascinating and relevant.

But seeing Twitter trump all of them in covering the turmoil in Iran is both exciting and sad. I'm not quite one of the new information elites (this is only my first post since like March or something, yo?!), but I at least realize that it's going to take the blogosphere and the twitterverse to actually alert me that there is more to know.